Non-gaming apps have overtaken games as the primary engine of mobile spending. Sensor Tower’s Q2 2026 Digital Market Index shows non-gaming revenue up 14.6% year over year to $24.4 billion while gaming revenue fell 4.5% over the same period.
Non-gaming apps generated 25.5 billion installs versus 11.3 billion for games, and nine of the top 10 non-gaming categories posted positive year-over-year growth. The single exception was Dating & Social Discovery, which fell 11% globally, driven by a 34% contraction in the US market. Latin America moved in the opposite direction, with Mexico up 41% year over year and Brazil and Argentina posting 19% and 18% gains respectively.
Generative AI Is Now a Top-Tier Revenue Category
Consumer spending on generative AI apps doubled year over year, posting 108% growth in Q2 2026. ChatGPT accounted for roughly 60% of category revenue with 82% year-over-year growth, and ranked as the world’s most downloaded app for the period, ahead of TikTok and Instagram. Claude’s trajectory stands out on the competitive side as Anthropic’s assistant climbed from the seventh-ranked generative AI app in Q2 2025 to second globally in Q2 2026, and posted the largest revenue growth of any breakout app, jumping 34 places to reach No. 10 overall by in-app purchase revenue. Grok and Gemini also saw rapid acceleration, though neither matched Claude’s ranking movement.
The top IAP revenue apps for the quarter were TikTok, ChatGPT, and Google One. PineDrama saw the biggest jump in downloads, climbing 237 places to No. 20 worldwide.
Geographic Splits in Spending and Downloads
US in-app purchase revenue declined 3% year over year, but the country still led all markets at $14.8 billion. China came second at $5.98 billion despite growing 10% over the same period, illustrating how the US retains scale even as its growth stalls. India held first place for downloads at 6.67 billion installs, up 4% year over year.
In 2025, consumers spent more in apps than in games for the first time in the mobile era, and App Store gaming revenue of $52.5 billion that year grew just 0.6% year over year despite topping Google Play and Steam combined. Apple CFO Kevan Parekh flagged the gaming slowdown explicitly during the company’s fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call, alongside App Store regulatory changes in certain countries and the ongoing impact of Apple’s temporary bar from collecting commissions on purchases made through external links in the US, a consequence of the Epic Games lawsuit. App Store net revenue has shown signs of pressure for several quarters, and the Sensor Tower data suggests that weakness from gaming is unlikely to ease near term, while AI subscription revenue, though growing fast, flows largely to OpenAI and Anthropic.
