Sensor Tower: worldwide App Store spending will reach $96B by 2023, up 104% from $47B in 2018; Google Play will reach $60B, up 140% from $27B in 2018
Context & Ripple Effects
Sensor Tower's five-year projection extends a forecasting race that App Annie opened in late 2017 with a $110B+ all-store forecast for 2018. Its own baseline is consistent: Sensor Tower counted $38.5B of App Store revenue in 2017 against Google Play's $20.1B, so the new numbers assume both stores roughly double over five years.
The near-term checkpoints support the trajectory rather than contradict it — H1 2019 came in at $39.7B across iOS and Android, up 15.4% year-over-year — and by 2021 spending was still setting records even as installs flattened, which is exactly the pattern this forecast depends on.
First-order effects
- Apple and Google each stand to collect commission on a base growing faster than their 2018 run rates — Play's projected 140% growth outpacing the App Store's 104% narrows the gap between the two stores from $20B to $36B in absolute terms.
- Developers now have a published demand curve to plan against, with Sensor Tower signaling that consumer willingness to pay inside apps keeps compounding.
Second-order effects
- If total installs grow slower than spend — as Sensor Tower's own 2021 data showed, with iOS installs actually declining — the money concentrates in fewer, deeper-monetizing apps, pushing developers toward subscription pricing; the top 100 non-game subscription apps alone drew $18.3B in 2021.
- Games and in-app subscriptions, the drivers App Annie flagged back in its 2018 forecast, become the categories where platform commission economics matter most, raising the stakes of any change Apple or Google makes to their revenue splits.
Third-order effects
- A market where spending doubles while install growth stalls structurally favors incumbents with large paying bases over new entrants, making app-store distribution and discoverability an increasingly contested resource between Apple, Google, and the developers who depend on them.
The trend: Mobile app-store revenue is decoupling from download volume, shifting the platforms' growth story from user acquisition to monetization depth per user.