How Many Apps and Games Get More Than 1,000,000 Downloads Every Month?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Gotta Google. Check out the full article for more insights.
A million is a nice number, right? I was curious, how many mobile apps and games get a million or more downloads every month and the number may surprise you a bit. I say that because last time I asked my followers to guess they were waaaaaaay off.
Last year, I crunched the numbers and discovered 1,305 apps and games with 1M+ downloads.
What do you think that number is today?
1,408. Exactly 103 apps more than last year (or 8% more).
Let's analyze these apps and games to see who's seeing these numbers.
Using Explorer I grabbed all 1,408 apps and games and analyzed them. Let's start by answering the simplest question - are there more apps or games on the list?
Apps, but not by that much. 47% of the 1,408 apps and games on this list are games, and the remaining 53% are apps. The downloads align as well. According to our App Intelligence, the games on this list were downloaded 1.6B times, while the apps on this list were downloaded 2B times.
B for Billion!
All the big names you could probably guess (or see in our most-downloaded apps and games series) are on this list so I'll skipp those and dig a bit deeper to see whoe else is getting so many downloads.
My analysis shows lots of apps for photo and video editing, food delivery, fitness at home, and even a few VPN apps.
Looking at the numbers by store, it's Google Play that has the upper hand (more like two hands). 87% of all apps and games getting more than 1M downloads are on Google Play. That includes both games and apps. Apple has 13% of those.
The downloads are massive! According to our estimates, those 87% of apps generated a little over 3B downloads last month vs a little under 500M from the App Store.
The top categories by number of apps are:
- App Store: Photo & Video (39), Social Networking (19), Productivity (14)
- Google Play: Tools (105), Social (36), Communication (33)
So, if you want downloads you have to be on Google Play!
There are many more ways I can slice this dataset but I think this gives you a good enough picture of where the downloads are. If you have a specific question this dataset can answer ask me on X/LinkedIn. And also let me know if you want me to do this for revenue.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
