Google Play: number of available apps 2009-2020

How many apps are there in the Play Store?

The number of available apps in the Google Play Store was most recently placed at 3.04 million apps, after surpassing 1 million apps in July 2013.

Google Play Store

Google Play was originally launched in October 2008 under the name Android Market. As Google’s official app store, it offers its customers a wide range of applications and digital media including music, magazines, books, film, and TV. As of June 2020, the ranking of the top-grossing Android apps worldwide is dominated by mobile games with Coin Master, Garena Free Fire: Rampage, and PUBG Mobile leading the ranking. This hardly comes as a surprise as it is estimated that gaming apps account for over 80 percent of Google Play app revenues. As most apps in the Google Play Store are available for free, the company needs to utilize effective business models to secure healthy revenue.

How do apps make money?

Despite the robust gaming app revenues, most gaming apps are free to download and rely on monetization via in-app advertising or in-game purchases of items such as boosters and accessories. An October 2019 survey of mobile app publishers found that video ads were the most popular mobile app monetization model, followed by in-app purchases and display ads. According to app developers, the biggest challenges when monetizing apps was ensuring that the ads are not too intrusive to the content and that app monetization does not affects the app experience.