Subscription businesses are growing around the world. Subscription plans create an incentive for the companies to improve their service or product to increase customer retention. For a customer, a subscription allows testing a new service with just a small initial payment.
Below you'll find the top 100 most popular subscription apps written in 2020. Meanwhile, we took a fresh look on some of the leading apps in the App Store, so check out the lessons learned:
Mobile apps are embracing the trend for the subscription monetization model. App Annie reported that in-app subscriptions accounted for $32 billion consumer spend in App Stores in 2019. And that figure has increased two-fold since 2016.
Top Grossing Apps on the Apple App Store in 2020
We’ve decided to examine the 100 top-grossing apps on the Apple App Store to see the share of apps using subscriptions and the most popular app categories. For this research, we used openly available data from App Annie and SensorTower. The top-100 ranking is based on the App Annie data as of the end of August 2020. Revenue estimates are from SensorTower for August 2020. All numbers below are rough estimates and should be considered an approximation to understand the scale of the apps described.
We’ve added several additional categories to standard App Store categories to provide more transparency in the data:
- We assigned some apps from the Entertainment category, either the Streaming, Social Networking, or Games category, where we deemed them to be more relevant.
- We grouped dating apps under one Dating category.
- We split the huge Games category into Games and Casino Games.
- We also grouped the following three apps from navigation, productivity, and sports into one Other category: “on X Hunt,” “Dropbox,” and “MLB” since these three do not fit in any of the other top categories.
Here is how the category distribution by the number of apps and by in-app revenue for the top 100 apps looks like:
Games and Casino Games apps account for almost 72% of total revenue for top-100 apps.
Here is the estimated annual revenue for each category:
According to our analysis, most games do not extensively use in-app subscriptions. Consumable in-app purchases are still the main monetization mechanic.
Streaming and Music Apps
The situation changes completely for the next largest category – Streaming and Music Apps. Most of these apps monetize primarily with in-app subscriptions. Here is the list with the estimated annual revenue for each app in the category:
These 12 category leaders drive roughly $2B in annual revenue on Apple’s App Store.
Social Networking Apps
The next largest category is Social Networking. Apps in that category use both consumable products and subscriptions.
You might be surprised to find Facebook on that list. Facebook provides in-app products to enable financial support to a limited group of video creators; that’s how Facebook explains the existence of in-app purchases in its apps.
Facebook earns up to $60M per year on in-app products, not a large share of Facebook’s $70 billion revenue last year, but still sizeable enough to be in the top 100 grossing apps.
TikTok is also on the list. TikTok users spend real money in the app to purchase coins that can be exchanged for gifts during live streams.
Dating Apps
The next largest category is Dating. Tinder dominates the category, but there are also other significant players. Subscriptions are the main monetization mechanic for this category.
Conclusions and Final Thoughts
Based on the data above, subscriptions drive 20 to 30% of the total revenue of the top 100 apps, and they are most popular in non-gaming categories.
While the subscription model can be very lucrative for the company, it comes with its own set of complexities. To increase the revenue that users generate over time, subscription companies have to reduce churn and ensure that users stay satisfied with the app for as long as possible.
If you are building an app with a subscription, you should try Qonversion. We simplify implementing in-app subscriptions and provide subscription analytics and tools to reduce churn and increase your app revenue.
If you find this post helpful or have any questions, we'd love to hear from you! If you are looking for opportunities to sell your subscription applications, read our guides on selling an app and increasing app valuation.
Michael
CEO at Qonversion
Michael leads Qonversion with a vision to help mobile apps maximize their subscription revenue.
