App Store Beats Google Play In Number Of New Million-Dollar Publishers

Rishu Mayadev - Jan 01, 2019

In 2018 alone, the App Store generated 164 new million-dollar publishers, which is twice as many as Google Play store.

The App Store has always surpassed Google Play in their developers’ app-monetizing capabilities, which includes income from in-app purchases and subscriptions. Sensor Tower has produced a report that will provide us with a new understanding of what this means for app developing enterprises: it has been discovered that App Store’s number of million-dollar apps in 2018 is nearly twice that of Google Play.

An analysis from the App Store intelligence company found that 164 new app developers have achieved million-dollar net revenues in 2018 on the US App Store, while only 88 app publishers earned that on Google Play.

Nevertheless, while Google Play has been outrun by the App Store regarding the number of new million-dollar publishers. Google Play is generating million-dollar apps at a faster rate.

The analysis shows that 143 million-dollar publishers were generated by the App Store in 2017, this number rose to 164 in 2018, which was a 15% increase. On the other hand, Google Play produced 71 million-dollar publishers in 2017, this number went up by 24% to 88 in 2018.

Of course, the majority of million-dollar app publishers are games, provided that a large proportion of the app store’s revenue comes from games. Among 164 million-dollar App Store publishers this year, 54 of them are game publishers. The top earner is Marvel Strike Force from FoxNext Games, which yielded more than 15 million dollars in 2018.

Nevertheless, the percentage of games among new million-dollar apps decreased by 10% in 2018, while other categories on the App Store increased. For example, the Health & Fitness category rose from 6 to 12% and the Lifestyle category went up from 5 to 10%.

On the other hand, most of the new million-dollar app publishers on Google Play are games, which occupies 65% in comparison with only 33% on the App Store, followed by the social category in the second rank, accounting for 6%.

Both Google Play and Apple's App Store have developed throughout 2018 regarding both incomes from customers’ expenditure and downloads. As of mid-December, these two app stores have total combined revenue of 76 billion dollars in consumer expenditure and 113 billion app downloads in 2018 worldwide.