94% of App Store revenues comes from top 1% of monetising apps: Analysis

Sensor Tower is a marketing services provider for applications. A study of application revenues in the US App store showed that the top 1% of paid applications, or applications with in app purchases, generated 94% of the total revenues of the App Store. This finding shows exactly how difficult it is for developers to make a hit app. Out of the $1.43 billion in net revenue generated by the App Store in the first quarter of 2016, $1.34 billion was generated by 623 publishers. The remaining $85.5 million in revenue was distributed among 61,677 publishers. Sensor Tower also tracked application downloads, apart from app revenues. 70% of all downloads were the top 1% of publishers. All the tracking information numbers refer to the publisher, not the number of apps of each publisher. Google was the top publisher for Apple. The other major publishers include Facebook, EA, King, Snapchat, Disney, Microsoft, Gameloft, Glu, Netflix, Zynga and Rovio. These handful of applications dominate the revenues in the App Store. This indicates that something is wrong with the way content is presented by the App Store. To make the App Store viable and attractive to more developers, Apple needs to change the way the store works. An App Store where more applications are discovered by users, downloaded and monetised can only stand to benefit both Apple and the developers.