Mobile app downloads worldwide 2024| Statista

The graph shows a comparison for app downloads worldwide from 2018 to 2024, using data from Sensor Tower and data.ai. Global app downloads have plateued in recent years, even declining, after seeing strong growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. For 2024 136 billion unique dowloads per user account were recorded.

Why the difference? Source methodology explains the gap

The discrepancy arises from significant differences in the methodolgy used by the sources to aggregate and generate the data. Sensor Tower reports only unique downloads per user account, excluding app updates, re-downloads, and installations on multiple devices by the same user. In contrast, data.ai includes these additional activities as well as downloads from third-party Android stores and a broader geographic scope, resulting in substantially higher total counts. As a result, Sensor Tower's numbers better reflect new user acquisition, while data.ai's encompass all market activity and total engagement.

Despite stagnating downloads user spending is growing

While the number of downloads is leveling off, consumer spending on in-app purchases and related revenue has grown in 2024 to 150 billion U.S. dollars, up from aroud 130 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. While gaming remains the highest grossing app category overall, the growth was driven by other categories. The entertainment, photo & video, productivity, and social networking categories ech grew by at least one billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2024 compared to the previous year.

Number of mobile app downloads worldwide from 2018 to 2024 (in billions)

Characteristic	data.ai	Sensor Tower
2024	-	136
2023	257	138
2022	255	142
2021	230	143.6
2020	218	143
2019	204	114.9
2018	192.45	105.3

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Release date

January 2025

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2018 to 2024

Supplementary notes

Sensor Tower methodology:

Download estimates presented are on a per-user basis, meaning that only one download per Apple or Google account is counted towards the total.
Downloads of the same app by the same user to multiple devices, updates, or re-installs of the same app by the same user are not counted towards the total.

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