Games weren’t the biggest thing on app stores for the first time ever last year

The mobile app industry has come a long way since early iPhone users would impress their friends by getting their phone out, tilting it at a 45-degree angle near their mouth, and polishing off a virtual pint of frothy beer in seconds on iBeer, an app that reportedly brought its developers $10,000 to $20,000 every day at its peak.

While iBeer may have (understandably) fallen by the wayside in the years since, the business of selling time-consuming content to fill your phone’s home screen and send the temperature of your device soaring has only gotten bigger, with users spending a record $167.4 billion on in-app purchases alone last year, per new Sensor Tower data.

However, according to the same State of Mobile 2026 report, in-app purchases across non-gaming applications actually outweighed those made in games for the first time ever, suggesting that the things many of us use our mobiles for has shifted.

Of course, just like the year before, there are still billions of dollars to be made in mobile games, but worldwide downloads slumped more than 7%, from 54.3 billion in 2024 to 50.4 billion last year, as in-app gaming purchases broadly flatlined. Maybe we are all collectively getting sick of those weird, bad, misleading gaming ads that flood platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

In-app purchases across non-gaming applications surged, conversely, to hit a record $85.6 billion, and — as is becoming a theme for many stories where the amount of cash involved is booming — AI was behind a good chunk of the rise. Indeed, as downloads across generative-AI mobile apps climbed almost 120% last year, so did in-app revenues, with users spending a whopping $5 billion while using apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok.