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War of apptrition

Data shows most new apps don’t just fail — they completely bomb

A new report shows that more than 80% of apps never reach $1,000 in monthly revenue in the first two years after launching.

Millie Giles

3/19/25 6:57AM

These days, you can’t do anything without signing up for something — with everything from (naturally) streaming services, to news sites, to chatbots, to airlines, to pet suppliers now operating on subscription models.

Luckily for Apple and Google, which take a cut of in-app payments through their respective app stores, many of those subscriptions now start through our phones.

But in the increasingly competitive battle for space on our precious home screens, most apps never even come close to getting enough subscribers to cover their costs.

According to the 2025 State Of Subscription Apps report from RevenueCat, published last week, just a handful of apps now dominate a huge share of users’ screen time. According to the research, the top 5% of newly launched apps make over 400x more in their first two years (~$8,888) than the bottom 25% (~$19).

The report also outlined that only 19% of new apps across all categories generated $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue within two years of launch, implying that 81% failed to hit that threshold. After this, the drop-off is steep, with a large portion of apps failing to meet each consecutive monetary milestone. At the upper end, only 5% of all new apps reached $10,000 in revenue.

Mobile apps subscription models — Sherwood News

Clearly, subscriptions alone are no longer enough for many newly launched apps to survive on. Now, hybrid monetization structures are becoming more common, with 35% of apps overall mixing subscriptions with consumable or lifetime purchases — including ~62% of Gaming apps and ~40% of Social & Lifestyle apps — to fuel revenue growth from both new and loyal app users.

App-eat-app world

Different types of apps also have very different subscription strategies. Health & Fitness apps were uniquely focused on yearly plans, with 66.6% of app subscriptions sold on an annual basis. Clearly, developers in the health arena are hoping that users have enough motivation to instill good habits to commit to an entire year. Gaming apps were the opposite: just 5.7% of subscriptions sold were for an annual plan, while weekly plans dominated, comprising 78% of subscriptions sold in the category.

Overall, of the categories surveyed, Photo & Video apps were the most successful in generating revenue, with ~28% of these newly released apps reaching $1,000 and ~9% reaching $10,000 in their first two years.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5