App Download Data (2024)

Mansoor Iqbal

Updated: November 5, 2024

The iOS App Store launched in 2008 with 500 apps. Today, there are over four million apps available across iOS and Android platforms, extending to a wide range of sub-genres and niches.

These apps have come to play a huge role in the way we live our lives today. Through them, we can access the entire Western canon of music (and much beyond it too), meet romantic partners, manage our diaries, documentation, and pay people without cash or card.

Augmented reality apps are changing the way we interact with the world, and mobile gaming now accounts for lion’s share of games industry revenue.

The market for these apps is about as big as they come. It is estimated that there are over six billion smartphone users worldwide, and about five billion of those have access to the internet. Some of the most popular apps in the world, such as Facebook and YouTube, have more users than China has people.

These devices are approaching ubiquity in advanced economies, among which median penetration levels stand at 76% of adults. In South Korea, 95% of adults own a smartphone.

Emerging economies are catching up. Brazil and South Africa already log penetration levels of 60%, and India is adding hundreds of millions of users every year. It is expected that in the next five years many of these markets will reach similar maturity levels to Europe and North America.

These figures are growing every year, and along with it, the market for mobile apps. In 2021, more than 100 billion apps were downloaded for the first time, and that is expected to reach 150 billion by 2025.

What these new apps will contain is anyone's guess, with Meta Platforms believing the future is in the metaverse and others, like developer of TikTok, ByteDance, seeing a future in algorithm curated news, music, and videos.

We have collected data and statistics on iOS and Android app downloads. Read on below to find out more.

App Download Key Statistics

  • 148.2 billion apps and games were downloaded in 2023, a 3.9% increase on the previous year
  • 55.6 billion of those downloads were for games, 92.6 billion were for apps
  • Google Play was responsible for 113.2 billion downloads in 2023, iOS had 34.9 billion downloads
  • Chinese mobile users downloaded the most apps, followed by India and the United States
  • Argentina, Colombia and Indonesia spent the most time per capita on apps in 2023