Report: TikTok is the highest-earning mobile app, PUBG Mobile still on top of the mobile gaming world

At the onset of the pandemic app installs shot up as people searched for something to do. Now with the vaccine rollout app installs on the Google and Apple platforms are down slightly (1.2% and 2.1%, respectively, year over year), but revenues have gone up.

Smartphone users spent a collective $33.6 billion on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store during the July-September quarter on apps, in-app purchases and subscriptions. This is a 15.1% increase over the same period last year when $29.2 billion was spent. The increase is slowing down, however, last year there was a 32% jump in spending for that same quarter.

The Apple store is still raking in the most money, an impressive $21.5 billion (+13.2% compared to last year), but Google’s platform is catching up as it took in $12.1 billion (+18.6%). There’s some more good news for Google, but more on that in a second.

Data from SensorTower shows that TikTok was the highest-earning app globally across both app stores in Q3. It recently hit 3 billion total installs, becoming the first non-Facebook app to do so.

TikTok was the top app in Apple’s store, but not in Google’s – there the search giant’s own Google One app holds the #1 spot (thanks to subscriptions for the cloud storage service). Piccoma shot up to the #2 spot overall with a 130% growth, YouTube and Disney+ are in the Top 5 as well. Below are the overall rankings as well as per app store.

Mobile gaming is heating up too, with users spending 7.7% more cash than Q3 last year – a whopping $22.4 billion. Most of that was spent in the Google Play Store ($13.1 billion) with iOS trailing ($9.3 billion).

As in previous quarters, the top mobile game is Tencent’s PUBG Mobile, which has amassed lifetime earnings of over $5 billion (including Game for Peace, the Chinese version of the game). Another Tencent game, Honor of Kings, is in the #2 spot, followed by Genshin Impact. Genshin may be only a year old, but it already has $2 billion of consumer spending to its name. Pokemon Go is still popular and was 4th, Roblox rounds off the Top 5.

Check out SensroTower’s full report for more details on the top-earning mobile apps and games, the most downloaded apps and games and more.