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App Releases Doubled, Downloads Up 2%: How Do New Apps Earn Money?

New App Store apps in the first half of 2026 roughly doubled from a year earlier, to about 560,000, but downloads rose only 2%. For subscription apps, median trailing 30-day revenue one year after launch is about $72.

Many people credit AI coding tools for the surge in releases, but that is a hypothesis from the app analytics firm Appfigures, and no source counts the AI-built apps separately. We set the cause aside and look at what the market looks like now and which of three models has evidence behind it: subscriptions and in-app purchases, paid upfront, and ads. Most revenue figures are 2025 data.

Twice the apps, the same number of users

According to a New York Times report (July 20) citing Sensor Tower estimates, the App Store got about 600,000 new apps in 2025, and in the first half of 2026 about 560,000, nearly double the same period a year earlier. The report gives no exact growth rate, so we say “roughly double.” Downloads rose 3% to 35.4 billion in 2025 and only 2% year over year to 17.6 billion in the first half of 2026. Appfigures’ first-quarter count points the same way: releases up 60% year over year across both stores combined and 80% on iOS alone. The periods differ, so the figures are not directly comparable.

Has review really slowed down?

Developers and Apple tell different stories. In March, 9to5Mac relayed developers waiting three days or more, sometimes about a week. In July, a report citing Business Insider described one new app waiting about six weeks. These are individual cases with no average or sample behind them. Apple counters that it reviews 90% of submissions within 48 hours, that the average is 1.5 days, and that it handles more than 200,000 submissions a week.

Both can be true. If 90% finish within two days, the other 10% can still wait a long time, and we could not find public data on how long that tail runs. The same Apple page says more than 40% of unresolved issues come down to guideline 2.1, app completeness (crashes, placeholder content, and so on). The surest way to shorten your wait is to avoid being rejected for completeness.

New apps take a small share of revenue

The market has not shrunk. Sensor Tower puts 2025 consumer spending on apps and games at about $167 billion (up 10.6%), and non-game in-app purchases passed games for the first time. But new apps take a small share. Take the RevenueCat report, which covers more than 115,000 subscription apps and over $16 billion in revenue.

  • Apps launched before 2020 earn 69% of subscription revenue. Apps launched in 2025 or later earn about 3%.
  • For subscription apps, median trailing 30-day revenue one year after launch is about $72. The top 25% are above $429, and the top 10% above $2,574. Half of apps earn less than the median, and it is not an expected return. The report does not say whether store fees are deducted or how apps with no revenue were counted.
  • Within two years, 17% of new apps reached $1,000 in trailing 30-day revenue (19% the year before) and 4.6% reached $10,000 (5.3% before). Games were the exception, at 9%.

Adapty, which covers more than 16,000 apps, also finds that the top 10% of apps take about 94.5% of subscription revenue and that about 58% of new apps earn under $1,000 in their first year. Both companies sell subscription tooling, and both datasets count subscription apps only.

Can an app get found without ads?

Yes, but at small scale. Apple says nearly 65% of downloads happen right after a search, but it has not published when or how that was measured. Linkrunner, an install-attribution service, looked at 92 apps from December 2025 to March 2026. Median organic share of installs per app (installs not traced to an ad) was 82.6%, and 93.1% for apps with fewer than 1,000 installs. That mixes word of mouth with untracked traffic, and the sample is small and from a vendor.

These numbers say small apps do not run ads, not that they gather many users without them. Among apps with 10,000 to 50,000 installs, the organic share falls to 64.6%. We estimate that an app can be found without ads, but nothing here shows that alone makes revenue grow. Keep in mind too that the 17% success rate above covers all new apps regardless of whether they advertise.

Three models, and what the data says

Subscriptions and in-app purchases have the most evidence. A hard paywall, which asks for payment from the first screen, has a median download-to-paid conversion (within 35 days) of 10.7%. That is five times the 2.1% of freemium, where users get a free tier and only some pay. Revenue per install at 60 days is $3.09 versus $0.38. Adapty, on the other hand, says a soft paywall that users can dismiss converts nearly 50% better from paywall view to payment. The answer depends on the denominator, so test both yourself.

Paid upfront had the thinnest evidence. Adapty says one-time and lifetime purchases rose from 6.4% of subscription-app revenue in 2023 to 10.3% in 2025, but that says nothing about the trend for paid-upfront apps as a whole.

Ads had the weakest evidence. Sensor Tower’s spending figures exclude ads, and we could not find a trustworthy 2026 ad-rate source. One ad-industry blog illustrates $5,000 to $7,000 a month for a game with 50,000 daily active users, but that is not a measurement. Ad revenue scales with users, so you need a way to bring users in first.

By store, about 70.5% of 2025 consumer spending (about $117.6 billion) went through the App Store and 29.5% (about $49.2 billion) through Google Play. That is a secondary compilation by Quash of Business of Apps modeling, and trackers disagree, so treat it as roughly 70/30. Google Play has about three times the downloads, and by Adapty’s data iOS accounts for about 85% of subscription revenue.

On fees, Apple charges 15% to developers with $1 million or less in proceeds the prior year through its Small Business Program (10% for subscriptions after year one). Google Play charges 15% on the first $1 million a year and 30% above that, and 15% on subscriptions.

What we could not confirm

  • We found no official Apple data on whether new apps once got more exposure in the store than they do now.
  • We found no store-by-store split or subscription conversion data for the Korean market.

Estimate and advice

What follows is our estimate and advice.

  • Rather than counting on launch-time exposure, decide first where your users will come from (search keywords, communities, a web presence). With median trailing 30-day revenue at $72, leaving it to luck is risky.
  • Start from subscriptions and in-app purchases, compare freemium and a hard paywall yourself, and consider a lifetime option alongside for users who dislike subscribing.
  • Treat ads as a supplement for lightweight utilities or games with many users. We found no evidence that ads alone can carry a business.

What to watch

  • Whether Apple changes review or spam and copycat policies for new apps.
  • How the new-app share of revenue (about 3%) moves in RevenueCat’s next report.

Sources

Source: www.revenuecat.com

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