State of Mobile 2026: 9 Trends That Matter

Everybody knows Gossip Harbor. This game is just climbing the ranks because it feels like there's no stop. I I was I was comparing it to Royal Match revenue numbers and I think it wouldn't be crazy to predict that in this year in 2026 they will surpass Royal Match. [music] Jonathan Briskrin, director of market insights from Sensor Tower. Welcome back to the podcast.
Hi, thank you so much for having me. Another year of State of Mobile, so another year to be great. Happy to be back on the podcast.
Listen, last time you were on the podcast, you got a promotion. So, let's see how this one goes. I don't know if there's a correlation or goality, but
yeah, let let's say there is. Let's might as well test it at least, you know? Might as well give it a shot.
Yeah. So, uh, whoever is your direct manager, if it's your listen on because we have nine graphs about the market. This this, by the way, this report is

phenomenal. It's very deep. It's very long, but there's so much data and I love the interactivity. So, there's link in the description below so that anybody can go and kind of interact with the graphs because you can change them around, look at different regions, different countries. So, excellent job on that. Thank you. Yeah, it's it's a it's a big project and I think like about 98 pages or something this year. Um, yeah, a lot of charts. So, yeah, hopefully something in it for everyone. Um, we do encourage you to to take a look and play around with it and uh yeah, and let us know if you have feedback, too, because it is big, but we're always trying to make it better. So, happy to to answer any other angles that people have, too.
All right. So, everybody keep a new account almost 100 slides. I chose nine of them. So you'll get the uh the context. All right. So let's get going. First slide. And if you're not listening to this on Spotify or on YouTube, I

maybe suggest you would because we are showing the graphs as we were discussing. We'll try to describe what's in the graph, but um it's definitely easier to follow in a video format. Now going in into our first graph which is surprisingly or not surprisingly the executive summary and my question Jonathan is that downloads are flat I mean we saw increase of about a 1% year-over-year and inapp purchases so this is without the web shops that are the hotness this is without inapp ad purchases or inapp inapp ads this is just the purchases they were up by almost 11% yearover-year. So, it looks like modernization first is not a slogan anymore.
Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case. Um, and yeah, you did a good job of describing it. Um, just to clarify, our data does cover iOS and Google Play.

So, when we're talking about downloads and revenue and things like that, that'll be what we're discussing. You know, not those web stores. Um, and yeah, an ad revenue or app revenue, we're talking about those inapp purchases, subscriptions, things like that that go directly through those app stores. Um, but yeah, I mean, I would say definitely not just a slogan anymore. Um, we've seen this shift kind of coming for several years now. I think if you look at the US, you can often see some of these trends ahead of time a bit. So, the US has seen this trend for a while where downloads have been even declining a little bit while revenue has still continued to climb. And then as we've seen those really rapid high growth markets like India, Brazil um you know from five years ago driving a lot of those new download growth has those have slowed um you know we've seen kind of that shift of focus toward back towards monetization and so I think we've seen app developers say it's harder and harder to get new users you have less areas to expand into. So less focus on keeping the users we do have engaged improving their experiences and

then of course monetizing that as well. The the other point of saturation of the market is when I look at the average time spent per user, it's only up by 1%. So this is the the the total hours per day has been 3.6 and basically it's quite stable. That is fortunately or unfortunately depending on whether you're human first or business first. human first, you're happy that it's not increasing that that rapidly. And business first, of course, it speaks of of the saturation point.
Yeah, for sure. And I think we saw a big, you know, we saw a big spike in time spent on mobile during the pandemic. And so we saw a lot of categories see rapid growth. Mobile gaming of course among them, but streaming, dating, a lot of these categories just saw huge growth then. And then since then we've seen that level out and time spent as you mentioned is basically flat up you know about 1.1% per user. So um you know

we're seeing again a kind of that shift towards people focusing on that time spent we we already have and trying to monetize it trying to improve that engagement. Um and then you know I think something else we'll touch on later on too is the attention economy. We're seeing that battle for attention between you know games, social media apps, uh short video streaming. you know, there's only so much time in the day. There's only so many hours you can reach people on mobile. So, we're seeing a lot of competition for those hours for these users. What do you think is driving the delta, meaning the growth of inapp purchases? Is it pricing, subscription model, better payer conversion or a mix shift? Like, you have all the data.
Yeah, I would say it's honestly a combination of all those different factors, but I typically kind of break it out into these three larger buckets. I'd say at least in terms of the macro trends and for this I'm going to focus outside of gaming just because that's where we're seeing the really rapid growth right now. Um so I'd say typically one is just the increased time

spent on mobile. I less so this year but more long-term we've just seen more and more people spending more time on mobile. So I think it's natural that as they spend more time on mobile they're spending more money where they are. The second shift and I think this is a big one is consumers getting more comfortable paying for things on mobile. So, we saw this, you know, again, games were pretty good about this early on, but people were pretty reluctant to buy things on their mobile devices, so pay for subscriptions and things like that. Um, but, you know, now we have Venmo, we have Apple Pay, people pay for all kinds of things on their phones all the time. And so, people are just really a lot more comfortable. You know, I'll subscribe for my streaming service on my phone where I am most of the time rather than just using the web. Um, and then the last bucket I would say is kind of that um, better monetization strategies as I think you touched upon. Really optimizing the pricing. Um, optimizing how to, you know, get people engaged to the point where they're willing to pay with different trials and things like

that. And then figuring out the best, you know, monetization strategy to use, whether it's subscriptions, whether it's one-time purchases or a mix.
Yeah, I mean, you touched a point and we're going to jump in into the next slide. We're going to talk about apps versus game, but I have to agree the the utility messaging of apps is quite phenomenal. And essentially, you can't use them for free. You can't use Netflix for free. You can't use I mean, you can use your favorite LLM for free a little bit, but then you kind of get stuck and you have to start paying. Same thing with all the book apps. Same thing with all the fitness apps. Like, you name it. They have such a great um just messaging about the utility that comes through the ads. It comes through the first time flow where they kind of get you, you know, um, comfortable with paying this app has been developed by Harvard Business, business school or whatever they would say, Duke and kind of like make make you make you just comfortable in subscribing and then the pricing is

perfect because they subscribe you for a year right away and you end up going into that high R ARPU and you can't even leave it because once you say I'm going to leave it, they're going to throw in a great minus 50% offer and suddenly your second year in.
Yeah. And that's I think we'll touch on this more later too, but I think one of the things is that you know non-games have learned a lot from games in terms of how to kind of optimize that funnel. Um you know starting off with that widest audience as possible. giving those free features that are give you just enough of the taste of the app to realize how much you actually value it, how um interesting it is to you, and then payw walling those those core features that for you know the typical person are, you know, worth actually paying up for and then pricing it accordingly. Um and so yeah, we've just seen optimization for that kind of just across the board on the non-game side of things. talking a little bit about this executive summary uh and what's behind the numbers. What are the top 20 markets uh that Shaw saw changes like where

where did the revenue concentrate and what could be the practical implication for go to market knowing this information?
Yeah. So I think when we're talking about revenue, it's hard not to start with the US. It's the biggest market on mobile still and it accounted for roughly 35% I believe of the global total. Um again across iOS and Google Play. Um noting that for example China, Google Play is not available there. So China's just iOS only. But uh even still it's just you know still the dominant market when it comes to monetization and it's still seeing pretty fast growth. So I think it's hard not to start there. Um but in terms of what's growing really quickly, um Western Europe is growing really quickly. So we have you know UK, France, Germany, Italy all outperforming the US in terms of growth and that's been the case for the last few years now. Um so I think we'll see more and more attention shift there and then some other markets like in Latin America you have Brazil is growing really quickly

too. So again it's not just the US. I think there's going to be a lot of shift in attention to these markets. in terms of what it means in terms of I think strategy, we're just going to see continued competition in markets like the US because it's just hard to ignore and that competition is just going to keep getting you know uh higher and higher. But then um we're also going to see I think short drama is another good example to look at in terms of how they rolled out which is really focusing on localization for these key markets. So, you know, if you're going to France, making sure you have your you have content that is in French and you have your um you know, your actual app store optimization in French. And the winners in short drama were the ones who could do that quickly and do it well enough to actually succeed in those markets. And I think we're going to see that for other other verticals, too. We're just like you basically have to be ready to hit the ground running pretty quickly in terms of localization to succeed in these markets like France that are growing really quickly. Yeah,

localization not only in the product but also localization in the marketing like that's uh that's super important but again with an onset of AI tools like I feel like localization has never been easier or culturalization let's put it that way has never been easier with with the uh with the go to market strategies
for sure and you know a lot of this is also you know again I mean we all know that AI can make mistakes but it's um just the fact that it can speed things up so quickly and then you can have something some other you know someone actually QA test it and review it. Um, I think that'll we'll see. Yeah, like the timelines for this really drop dramatically in terms of the ability to kind of get out into these new markets, which just I mean this has been a trend for a while. We say mobile is global. It's the case, right? We're going to see a lot of these top developers releasing their new apps really trying quickly trying to get that global presence because again it's not just the US that is the, you know, the dominant market anymore. We are seeing a lot of other

countries growing really quickly. And if you want to win, you really just need to make sure that you got a foothold in all these different markets.
Yeah. But US is $60 billion out of 167 billion, which is the total market size in terms of inapp purchases. Uh when you look at that 60 billion, what is still growing in the US market?
Yeah. So, I'm going to sound like a broken record on some of these because they're the two big breakout uh genres of the of the year, but AI, of course. So AI assistants like Chat EBT, Gemini, um, Grock, things like that. And then short drama, the other breakout one, which I've already mentioned. Um, those are growing everywhere. And so they're driving a lot of the growth in the US. But it's not just those. Um, if we look at the other top subg genres by year-over-year growth, we have like social media. Um, so Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram in addition to Tik Tok of course. um but focusing more on inapp purchases in addition to the ad revenue.

Um we have shopping this year which is an interesting one I think largely driven by um Amazon um having probably Amazon Amazon Prime subscriptions and then you know just some other r like I'd say random but more like uh you know more niche uh genres as well like uh file management and like you know you also have like your Google Drive and things like that Google one app. Yeah. Yeah. So, anything that involves those inapp purchases, um, we're seeing growth and health and fitness is another example. Um, but I think, you know, to answer your question too, I think another interesting question is what isn't growing and as much in the US. And, um, interestingly, streaming, OTT streaming grew only 3% year-over-year, which is a pretty big slowdown. And then a lot of these early adopters to monetization on mobile like dating um music and podcasts books and comics and then photo editing all declined year-over-year. So we are seeing a lot of the growth is actually in the US is coming from these

later I guess like later adopters to inapp monetization whereas the early leaders are you know at least kind of stalling out at least a little bit right now. Um, again, these these uh these trends may shift a bit, but you know, bringing that over to gaming, I think that's a lot of what we're seeing on the gaming side, too, where it's harder to see that rapid growth when you've been doing this for, you know, about 20 years now in terms of trying to get your revenue strategies optimized.
On sensor tower, you're not seeing the revenue that comes from outside the app store. So you're you can use certain apps like let's say LinkedIn for example I can pay with Apple Pay and then you can see that but a lot of people probably pay on the browser version which is actually a lot cheaper too. Um so you're not seeing that.
Yeah that's true. Especially because yeah if you're um you know trying to go around those app store fees you'll see sometimes cheaper prices on the web. Um and then yeah another thing I mentioned I know I mentioned shopping in like Amazon. Um, of course, inapp purchases

are not uh don't account for like physical goods. So, like all your Amazon shopping purchases and things like that, those are not counted here. It's just those inapp purchases. So, like your Amazon Prime subscription.
I've been talking about this for probably like 3 years, how apps are overtaking games. They called me a fear-mongerer and whatnot, but look, here's the chart. Apps are just accelerating. like they took over, but looking at this graph, it's they're going to land to be like twice X the size of gaming business in terms of inapp purchases on mobile.
Yeah, it's pretty incredible and we've had enough time to see this coming. And again, for I guess people who are listeners, we're looking at um just comparing the app revenue over time compared to games. And you know, when I joined Sensor Tower back in 2018, we can look on this graph here. It was I don't know it's hard to see exactly but maybe roughly 3x for games compared to non-game.
Yeah. 7525 tradition.
Yeah. And games were growing even

quicker at that point too. And so for this shift to have happened in the past eight years where um in 2025 people actually spent more on inapp purchases in non-game than they did in games is pretty remarkable. And as you mentioned the growth is still just accelerating. we saw 21% growth for um apps compared to just 1% year-over-year growth for games. And so, especially now with AI coming in, I don't see this trend uh you know, changing anytime soon. I remember we were doing those graphs um I think it was like postcoid where there was inflation was a big topic and we're looking at disposable income and the effect of his disposable income going down and looking at the spending of apps and games and so every time the disposable income dipped the inapp purchases dipped but apps didn't move at all.
Yes. And I think some of that may have just been maybe maybe it did dip a

little bit and it was just lost in the noise of how quickly it was growing besides that. But yeah, I think you know again games are much more tied to disposable income in certain ways than a lot of non-game. We may say that shift for example with things like short drama that is more just like purely entertainment focused and maybe more attached to disposable income. But yeah, that was definitely the case then and um I think will be something that's interesting to watch moving forward too is that you know game developers really have to pay attention to the macroeconomic conditions because it does impact consumer behavior and so it can I think change what types of games are going to exceed and what kind of markets.
Thank you for saying econom economics because Chris is always giving me when I talk about economics on the podcast and I have a degree in that. Anyways, [laughter] um, so I wanted to ask you about game spending plateauing. Do you see this as apps taken away from games or is this web shops kind of people spending

outside of the games and we're not seeing this? Is it more shifts towards inapp ads? Like is it the combination of all like where does this plateauing comes from?
Yeah, I think it is. And sorry, this is going to be an answer for a lot of these. a little bit of combination of all of these. Um I do think like you mentioned the web stores for example because it's just an inclusia app stores. I think the fact that we're still seeing even positive growth is not a bad sign because some of that growth is likely going to the web stores as well. Um I actually don't interestingly I don't think that apps are you know taking revenue necessarily from games as much besides as what I mentioned earlier kind of about the attention economy and fighting for that user attention and then that kind of wallet. Um, I just think that, you know, we're seeing, you know, nine-day monetization just kind of on its own trajectory right now where, as I mentioned, people are just really becoming much more willing to pay for these types of things in their on their on their phones for non-games. And then also, I think, just getting more value

of them out of them, too. Potentially, we're getting new features, new things that are potentially worth paying for. Um, again, a lot of those powered by AI as well. So for me I see you know from games I don't necessarily see this as necessarily taking money from games pockets for example. The one thing that I think will be um interesting is you know I kind of mentioned earlier we saw a lot of non-games learning the lessons from games because you know for games that's where the money was. They had a lot of incentive to um really figure out the right strategies test things make find out things that work. Um, one thing that I think will be interesting is as game uh, non-game revenue continues to sore, we might see more innovation actually coming from the non-game side of things. And so we might see a little bit of shift where games are going to have to look at the strategies used by non-games. Again, going to use short drama as an example um, to see what's what's working well there and actually start imitating, you know, the non-game successes as well. Web stores. You've

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that saga map. It's like this is how far apps can go. Look how far ahead we are. And now things have flipped and essentially most of the users that are using apps are paying users. So it's a it it feels like there's a stark difference where we're trying to monetize and extract value out of like 3% of the user base or 5% in some cases. They are gaining value from 90% of their user base even more sometimes even 100 depending on the app.
Yeah, for sure. And then some of these differences though I think are also just kind of inherent to the products. Um so for example I think most non-game still rely pretty heavily on subscriptions. Tik Tok is of course a big uh
counter example there. Um and that's just something that I think is just going to be harder for to bring over to the gaming side. We've seen some you know some attempts to do it with different game passes and things like that. Um, but I think, you know, again, it's just maybe not quite as good of a

fit in terms of what the the customer is expecting there.
And then on the graph, what we're seeing here is, of course, the uh the the first graph is showing the growth of apps and games in terms of inapp inapp revenue uh since 2015 to 2025. And on the second graph, there's a worldwide inapp purchase revenue growth by non-game genres. And of course, the biggest one is generative AI. So, no wonder this has grown so rapidly because this this product is essentially what two years old maybe.
Yeah, about that. I'll give it about that.
Yeah. Yep. I think that's about right. And uh [clears throat] in in the intro, I mean, a lot of this is actually just chat JPT, which is um I think we can touch on it more later, too. But um I feel like we're just at the starting point of these AI apps even starting to think about monetizing through these app purchases and even despite not even a lot of
ads. It's true. Yeah.

Yeah. So it is starting to focus on
monetization. They're they're burning money left and right.
Yeah. And when you're
I mean when you're making also but making $3 billion uh already is pretty pretty impressive too.
And then we're seeing movies and TV shows and social media as you discussed like those are the biggest ones. And then after that comes in utilities, multimedia design and and other stuff. Um if you're an executive at
[snorts]
um gaming company and you're looking at these graphs, what should you be thinking? Yeah, I mean, so I'm I think again some of the the main um the main competition you're going to have is for that attention. So, for example, uh overall time spent we saw a climb um about 4% 3.8% I believe year-over-year. Um so that's that additional time spent per user plus the additional users. That's how you get that 4% overall in total time spent increase. But for gaming it

only climbed about 1%. So to me that is a potentially a little worrisome. If again you're losing time to these different apps that is going to be a big challenge and I think something you need to focus on is how do we get user attention back. How do we get you know your game to be that default thing where if you're bored you have a few minutes that kind you know that's the the app you're going to open not Tik Tok for example. Um or not chat GBT even. Um and then the other thing I think is just um again kind of tracking what these apps are doing and if again if there are lessons that can be applied whereas you know looking at chatbt's monetization might not actually be super instructive if you're a mobile game but for some of these other types of apps you mentioned like Dualingo um we also have again short drama a lot of these monetization strategies there might be some lessons you can learn and so start tracking
these new breakout successes is particularly on the monetization side. See what's growing really quickly and see if there's lessons that you can

learn that actually can be transferred over to the gaming side.
And would it be crazy to say to some is like, you know what, guys, like you have tremendous app development talent. Apps are rocketing the top grossing charts. You know how to market. You know how to publish. Why don't you make an app? Hell, you can even make a subsidiary and raise money for that because with this type of a growth, the investors are looking to invest into great app teams. That'd be crazy way to think about it.
No, actually not. I mean, you know, again, I'm going to sound keep repeating this, but like short drama is the one that's really interesting to me as the breakout category and it just how it reminds me so much of like the game's mentality in terms of pretty much the entire scale for the battle for new users. I mentioned the localization and creating localized content to even just like their kind of uh loops and how they

try to monetize users. um their ad strategy is trying to appeal to a wide user base. Um again, it's not a onetoone mapping, but I do think like, you know, if you're a game developer, could you kind of try to break into a space like short drama or something similar? I think absolutely. There's a lot of lessons that you can learn that can can be brought over and can give you a competitive advantage for sure.
Short drama. Okay. So, let's talk about the the Kingmakers, the the short drama as well as the AI assistance. when I look at the um the top charts. So you have two different type of charts like one is I I put it on this on the United States since that's like 60% of the market and especially or 60% of the western market. Uh and here we can see top downloads, top inner purchase revenue and top in terms of monthly active users. Not very surprising downloads is like chatbt, Tik Tok and threads. That's weird. Who uses threads?

Capcot, which is the uh the product for your Tik Tok videos and the WhatsApp messages, the Instagrams, the T-OUS and so forth. And in terms of inner purchases, just like you said, Tik Tok leads it. YouTube coming in second because people hate ads no matter what the ad executives are saying because I think that's the only thing you can pay for, right? It's like get rid of these intrusive ads.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the YouTube subscription. Um, actually I believe they do have um they do have like movies and TV shows one time purchases.
That's true. That's true.
But my guess is the the majority of the revenue does come from those subscriptions.
Yeah. Yeah. You're really tempted to uh to use that. Especially like I anybody who use YouTube on their phone, which is 100% of the men and 70% of the women. [laughter] And I feel like even looking at that like that is the most touchable your screen becomes when you're watching YouTube video like it always jumps into an ad. Have you noticed that?

Yeah. They time the ad at the at [clears throat] the the time and like the Yeah, I'm so guilty of this too. I'll be like doing dishes or something, have a YouTube video up in the background, my hands will be wet, so like an ad comes on at the worst time and I'm like just I'm stuck to listen to and I can't skip it. So I'm going to be listening to two minutes of ads now.
[laughter]
Yeah, cuz even if you look at it sideways, your YouTube app, it will jump in into an ad page. Like I don't know what they what kind of magic they did there, but it is the most hyper responsive ad screen ever invented on your phone. Like you can't breathe on it and it jumps it.
Yeah. So, I guess maybe we shouldn't say it's not surprising that they ran number two by revenue here. They they know what they're doing. Shout out to YouTube. [laughter] Like basically putting so much friction that people are paying billions of dollars not to see ads. [laughter] Okay. And then uh monthly active users again, Google, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome. Wow, that's a that's a flush.

Yeah. So, and we'll note that a lot of the Google apps are going to be pre-installed on your Android devices. So um you know that's of course part of why they see such a big advantage but again they're pop they're popular on a lot of these are also popular on iOS and uh then that's after that was where you see those meta apps so like Facebook
and no AI assistant in the top active users.
No although chatbt I believe is getting close um I'd have to check on the US market there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh so let's go to the u the revenue chart. Uh what's uh what's the what's the uh the micro drama that people should try? You've probably played several of those.
Um you're sorry. You're saying the uh which short drama app are you talking about? Games now.
Yeah. Yeah. Short drama.
Yeah. So I've tried a few of them honestly mostly just to I was trying to get a sense of what um what uh they were doing and how they were working so well. So I think there's like Drama Wave and

Drama Box. Honestly, I might be confusing the names because a lot of them sound very similar. Um, and but there's like I think like I don't know 10 to 20 that have I forget which threshold for downloads or revenue, but like it there's a bunch all in the market right now. Um, and um, so yeah, I've tested a few um, honestly not my sort of entertainment to be honest. Um, but you can kind of you can kind of see how they work honestly. So, one thing it's funny I'm it reminds me of I don't know if you remember this was is this is kind of an old old poll, but do you remember QuBI back in the day? This app in 2020. Um
Oh, the the Tik Tok competitor.
Yeah. So, it was this um basically they were trying to do these like 10minute uh it was but it was basically like almost like full full production value uh videos.
How do you spell it?
Uh Q UI BI. Um, and part of it was the timing. I think they launched in April of 2020, so it was, I think, the pretty

bad time to launch this app that's supposed to take a lot less of your time, um, during the pandemic. But it was basically just trying to do essentially what these micro dramas are doing, which is say, we're going to have really short video, you know, short dramas essentially, these 10-minute long videos, but like full quality production. And it flopped. it like, you know, got no traction, found no audience, and failed uh really quickly. Um so when short dramas came around a couple years ago, I was pretty skeptical cuz I was like, I thought we tried this and there was no audience for it. Um but then you go in and you're like, "Oh, this is different. It's much more, you know, you got the vertical video. It's more tailored like a almost like a Tik Tok experience. Definitely does not have the high, you know, this super uh expensive production quality that would go into like your normal streaming show. Um, and so it really is just like a different way to do the short drama style. And um, yeah, it's just been remarkable how successful it's been.

Now I remember like I I was trying to Google for it and it's so difficult even to spell Q U I B I Quickbit Bites Quibby. I don't even know how to pronounce this. This was an absolute tire, right? This was the uh Jeffrey Katzenberg and me Whitman. They launched in 2020 and shut down. They launched in April, shut down in December and lost $1.75 billion.
Yes. And so again, I think I think a lot of what they were going on was like, "Oh, you're stuck at the office. You have like, you know, like you're going to be at the water cooler for 10 minutes. You can watch a short drama like during lunch or something." I think that was kind of the premise. And yeah, as you can imagine, the pandemic was the wrong time to launch that. Um, [laughter] but I also think, you know, we've seen with short drama is like it's a misunderstanding of how people want to spend their time. And I think honestly this is kind of true on the gaming side, too. It's you either you either are like ready to be fully engaged and immersed in something for an hour or even longer.

Like look at the the last um uh Stranger Things episode, right? I think that was like two hours. Um, people are willing to sit down and spend a bunch of time on something that has a lot of, you know, really high quality, really immersive, or they, you know, are good spending however much time they have, whether 30 seconds or 20 minutes just kind of scrolling or doing something that's, you know, these kind of quick hits of, you know, drama or entertainment, suspense, and that's kind of the way to do it. And anything that's not in those sweet spots kind of just, um, you know, doesn't really work in today's attention economy. Hm. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that you could say that the PMF, the product market fit was not quite there for Quibby.
Yeah, I think that's safe to say at this point. [laughter]
Jesus Christ, $1.75 million billion dollars in um LLMs or sorry, AI assistants, that's a nice word. Um which one are the high?

Like you said, Chat GPD is the highest grossing and in the report you say basically it reached $3 billion in spend in historic speed. Who else is doing well? Is is Claude there? Like what's going on? How far apart are they?
Yeah, in terms of revenue, there's a huge gap. Again, I think largely because a lot of these apps aren't actually focused on monetizing right now. So that's why it's almost again it's it's kind of remarkable. I mean, chatbt has just reached such a huge audience. This is something that I think would have been, you know, we looked at that app revenue chart. If catch, if something like catch JPT had emerged five years ago, it would not be at nearly this revenue. It's just people again are willing to pay for, you know, your premium subscriptions now. So just by the fact that it became such a popular app so quickly. It was able to get just a huge paying user base in addition to its free user base really quickly. And so is the vast majority of the revenue right now. I believe some of the other top ones. Um I'm checking my notes. I think so like chat on I think is

actually number two which is kind of more of a niche one. There's Grock and then Claude and then I think rounding out the top five is Sununo which is a um actual like a a music generating app, a song generation app. So you know like Gemini and I think Meta and a lot of these even Grock I mentioned as be ranking third. They're not focusing all that much I think on monetization right now. still that battle for new users and for engagement. So, you know, for example, this last year we saw them all competing for image generation. And so that's where we saw kind of the competitive edge was when they would launch their new image generation or video generation features. They get a huge boost in users. Um, so I think that's a lot of where the focus is for these apps. a little bit less on the monetization side, which again I think makes it so kind of remarkable that ChatGpt was almost able to not necessarily say stumble into this amount of revenue, but I think it was just again it was for them it was pretty simple. It was all about just building

this huge user base and then monsizing actually was relatively simple from there.
Yeah. And they were adding ads as as has been reported. But $3 billion means that you're making $250 million a month in inapp purchase revenue. And at the same time, Chat Open AAI is losing $200 million a month. So that's uh yeah, they need way more money to even stay stay break even.
Yeah, I think the I mean all these apps I think are in it for the long haul. They're trying to again they're they're in the the area of trying to get new users, get new attention, get engagement, and then figure it out from there later.
Yeah. 200 million in the red every month. That's uh that's a wild number. That is a that's why you have to promise the moon. You'll say, you know, I don't even know if we need currency anymore once we're done with this. [laughter] Like outlandish propositions. Uh
yeah, I guess we'll we'll see what they do. We'll see what their next payment

is. I'm very curious to see what it'll be.
Promise, promise, promise until until uh for as long as as needed. Um so games have had a quieter year. Were there any $1 billion entrance?
No. So we actually did not have any which was um a little disappointing. For the past few years, we've typically had maybe one I think up to even three games make it. Um although it's not the first time we haven't had a new entrance. So, this is saying, you know, a g we have we had uh I believe nine games reach $1 billion in inapp purchase revenue last year. Um but we had no new entrance to that nine that billion dollar club. Um I do want to note that uh like Pokemon Pocket fell like just short according to our estimates like basically a tie. Um you know 900 and maybe like 90 million or something like that. So it was just short. Um and then Gossip Harbor is another one that was pretty close this year. So, I would be surprised if we did

not see any new entrance again next year. We just didn't have any, you know, like Monopoly Goes or Last War, White Out Survival. Um, those types of games that made it last year.
Yeah, Gossip Harbor is interesting. It's in that Merge Two or Match Two, however you want to put it, category. Is it called Merge or Match Two? How How do you,
you know, now now I'm questioning. I was like, I was going to say like merge match two and just say both of them, but I'm [laughter] not sure. I have to look how we classify it. you you you've been answering always like well it's kind of all of them to use [laughter] merge match too.
Yeah, I'll keep it consistent there.
Yeah, but uh anyways, everybody knows Gossip Harbor. This game is just climbing the ranks because it feels like there's no stop. I I was I was comparing it to Royal Match revenue numbers and I think it wouldn't be crazy to predict that in this year in 2026 they will surpass Royal Match. Yeah, I mean its ascent as you mentioned is like just actually remarkable. I'm So

I'm pulling up my notes real quick because I I wanted to write down like how quickly it's risen. So let me just check real quick because the numbers itself are are pretty
again it's just ascent is so fast. Um
yeah.
Yeah. So let me just check real quick. But um yeah so it was so when it launched in 2022 it ranked 26 sec 262nd by revenue
in by 2023 it climbed to 64th
by 19th it by 2024 it climbed from 64th to 19th and then in 2025 it felt climbed all the way to number five. So just this really steady rapid ascent in terms of the its uh inapp purchase revenue and just remarkable. I think um our games analyst was able to find that since it launched 84% of the months uh it saw year month overmonth growth in revenue. So 84% of those months it grew. Um that said I will say you know in terms of could it become like the number one

puzzle game. Um, it still, as I mentioned, has some uh some uh uh road to climb. I would say it fell just short of, as I mentioned, just short of a billion dollars last year.
Yeah.
Whereas, you know, you see your top casual performers like your Royal Match and Monopoly Go both exceeded two billion. So, still quite a gap there. Um though I mean if it keeps growing at what it did last year um you know again it'll be able to I think close that gap fairly quickly.
Yeah, it looks like it's it's neck on neck with Roblox. Pretty wild.
Yeah, it's it's it is really and just an incredible
purchase revenue. It doesn't look at Roblox and different platforms and Yes. Yes. Yes. But still on inapp purchases.
Yeah, that's a good point. Um, but yeah, it's it's uh and it'll so it'll definitely be one to watch in 2026.
Yeah. Well, you talked a lot about short drama.

Uh, there's still missing from the uh the charts and downloads and revenue and monthly active users. This is again top 10 of all. What's the core loop that makes a short drama pay? And and can you name one title so that everybody can ruin their life and install it?
Yes. Um, so yeah, in terms of the core loop that makes it pay and so we actually classify um I believe right now we're looking at the top games. We do classify these as apps, so non-games, but so yeah, I'm not sure if they rank in the top 10 of either of those uh if those rankings.
They weren't here. Uh
yeah. Oh, you're right.
No, no, they weren't.
Yeah, you're right. They're not. Um so if you go into the report and actually go to um some of the breakout charts, um I think you'll see them a lot there. So, they're not in the top 10 yet, but uh o overall, but they're rising really quickly in terms of like the the core loop that makes them pay. Again, I think you'll see a lot of similarities to the gaming side, but also some differences. So, first off, you get that really quick

hook, you know, first 10 to 20 seconds get you intrigued, get you wanting to keep watching. You transition that into like binging where you have these short episodes of, you know, like a minute. Um, but each one kind of ends with a cliffhanger that makes you want to keep walk watching and then you have the tension kind of just increase over time too. So you're consistently as you're going you cliffhanger but then you ratchet it up a little bit, cliffhanger again and ratchet up a little bit until you get to that point where you know you need to pay to keep watching. And so that's you know when you the the most suspense that's when you need to unlock additional videos, right? And so when they really have you um that's when you know you're going to have to pay. Um a lot of these apps actually use a mix of inapp purchases and these onetime purch or sorry subscriptions and these onetime purchases. So they'll have like you know the ability to buy coins which can be used to unlock the episode for like about you know $5 or $10. Um or they will have uh weekly memberships which

the typical price right now. Um, sometimes, you know, have promotions where it'll be a few dollars off when you start, but the typical price is $20 a week for these subscriptions.
So, you can imagine that's you're talking about the revenue growth. Um, it's just really quick monetization. And then again, so try to keep you engaged as as long as possible with these, you know, these micro dramas um to get really, you know, get that high as high as LTV as possible from these users. So, that's how they work. Um, again, you can kind of see the analogies with the game side where if you think of like these short episodes kind of being like similar to the levels of games where you're also ratcheting up the stakes where you're playing the games until you you reach that boss level and you know then uh yeah, wanting to maybe pay to unlock more energy to keep playing the game or unlock more levels when you get out of lives. Um, similar kind of style with short drama except it's just unlocking, you know, more content in this case. And what are what are some of

the example apps?
Yeah, so um let me pull up some. So the one actually I have on my my phone the one I the one I've tested out is Drama Box. Um
Drama Box
I believe one is
sounds like it's made in China.
Yeah, I think a lot of these are a lot of these do come from China and Eastern publishers.
Kind of clear because they're insane content treadmills and they monetize basically by unlocking way more content if you pay. So
yeah, actually I just pulled up the list.
Yeah, so Drama Box is the top one by downloads in 2025. And then there's Real Short, there's uh Cuckoo TV, there's Drama Wave, there's Rapid TV. A lot of these um they have like these uh like red and orangey kind of icons. So you see a lot of apps that kind of look like that with like a play button or something like that. A lot of these are those kind of same style apps. And there's a ton of competitors out there. So there's a lot of different ones you can try. And another thing you mentioned about the content

that is like they produce so much content to keep up with this. So like they're that's another way they hope they keep users engaged is they'll unlock new episodes um really really frequently to try to keep people coming back, keep them watching um you know sometimes you'll even like uh talking about like almost like the gamification of these apps. You'll have things like you can watch ads to unlock more episodes. So, similar to rewarded ads in games, course you can um get rewards for like sharing it with a friend. You can get rewards for logging in every day that like login bonus. So, a lot of that kind of similar style to what we see on the mobile game side.
Yeah. And and just uh I can share some of the uh the images of drama box advertising. So this is, you know, if you can see the uh baby d surprise baby daddy is the CEO [laughter] and and u divorced wedding day, the princess

of his heart. So it's very much the sort of like romantic fiction as well as getting closer to the 50 shades area in some of these images definitely uh as much as Google Play allows. But um yeah, interesting. Interesting. I will be in my drama box today.
Yeah, I've noticed romance is a huge theme for that. Um so yeah, and if you if you if you're interested in these uh very quick romance style style dramas, uh you've got a lot of different options now.
I am. [laughter] [snorts]
Can't wait.
You know, I thought I thought that about you. [laughter]
Yeah. Yeah. I need some quick drama in my life. Um, okay. So, let's let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about Sorry, there's so much to talk about. I'm trying to move faster. Um, social media. Let's talk about social media. So, there's uh Oh, interesting. What do I have in this graph? So, in this graph,

basically this is probably the breakout. So, I have downloads, inapp re, inapp revenue, and time spent per hour. And this is as you have been describing before. So, we see worldwide generative AI. social media and movie and TV show. So, short drama really going up. In terms of time spent, I feel like wow, social media time spent has just
Yeah.
Jesus Christ. Uh that's scary. Uh and in terms of downloads, um yeah, collab generative AI, movies, TV shows. Okay.
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the next slide which is the u this one. So, social media and on the social uh social apps side we can see that 60% of mobile time is in social or social messaging and it feels like this sort of a there's a a attention scarcity that you were talking about. lot of people are spending way more time on social media and probably way less time on games because when they're choosing um the their entertainment waterfall when you take your the your your phone out starts with with Tik Tok, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. Yep. You do have the social medias being those kind of apps that just grab your attention right away. Um and yeah, definitely potentially taking time from games. Um, as we saw in the previous chart, how of how it's, you know, like the far leader in terms of time spent growth, time spent on social media actually only climbed about 5% year-over-year, but it's so much of people's time spent already. It's so big

of a piece of the pie that it doesn't take a lot to really eat into a lot of these other categories. So, we are definitely see that. Um, you know, again, I think it is really speaking to that competition for users attention. Um, and again kind of being what is that go-to app that you want to open when you have a few minutes? And again, is that going to be are you going to open last war and you know play this strategy game or are you going to open Tik Tok, you know?
Yeah. And partly I feel like there is at least the example that you gave and that resonated well with me is the passive social media because in this case YouTube is number one in terms of social media as a subgenre but I I I don't understand how YouTube is social media may like not it really isn't. It is streaming. And the way we use YouTube is we do other things and it's almost like that TV on your kitchen in in your living room or somewhere else. We're just listening to it and kind of giving

it a glance.
Yeah. It's it's a really hard one to classify honestly. Like it kind of fits in both like video streaming as well as social media. Um but I think you know part of the reason it's here is that in some ways its usage is very is you know it's more dominant like the social media apps you know whereas people spend a lot of times on on Netflix they spend a lot of time on Hulu all these other streaming services but it's less of that you know like you know again the longer longer form content right it just you'll have to set aside some time for it whereas we do see with like YouTube the behavior is going to be more like a Tik Tok where people are just going to open it and another thing we've noticed is just you know we've seen short form video kind of continue to grow even in non-game. Um, so like you know you have YouTube shorts, you've got Instagram reels. Um, and so that's another trend where we're just seeing a lot of that too. And that's actually even expanding outside of the the social media space. I mean, you think like ESPN, I think, has these vertical video

now. Um, I know the New York Times app has some vertical videos. So, we're seeing that kind of just spread outside of social media as well. Yeah, Spotify as well like really moved into a video as well. Now books now they're they're eating that up. But I I do have to say the business the product manager in me that uh that that cold bastard is only thinking about how magnificent the business of YouTube is. I mean it's UGC. It has inup ads. It has inapp purchases where you can rent the movies. It has subscription. Uh the reach is insane. The monetization is insane. Uh, it's untouchable. I mean, wow.
Yeah. Honestly, it might be my, if I had to look, I might be my most used app because like, yeah, just you have it on the background, right? And like you because you can use it as the audio, you can use it. It's just Yes. So many different forms of entertainment. Just again so easy to use. Um, so accessible for so many people, so many different things. It's everywhere.

I bet this I bet this evening you'd be like, six and a half hours of YouTube? How? Like I never sat down to watch it.
Yeah. I've like needed to start setting those, you know, those uh those time limit alerts on your phone to like limit usage. And sometimes Yeah. It's like you just you'll like I'll hit my limit without even like I won't have even realized I've been opening the app and it's like my 45minute limit or whatever you set it at is up. It's it's remarkable.
And you had to skip 200 ads during this time.
Yep. And I Yeah. I uh I am guilty. I don't have pay for YouTube Premium. So, I just I do listen to all those ads
every day. It's getting closer and closer than they are. [laughter] Not that the ads are bad, but god damn it, like enough is enough. I don't want to see 200 ads.
And they they do really know how to time them.
They do really [laughter] good. Google is good. Um, we're not evil. Um, anyways, uh, so so we have, uh, let me just move into to

the next things. I don't want to spend too of too much of our of time here and go into games because that is uh a big reason why people are listening to it. We've been glazing everything else. So looking at yearover-year change for mobile games in 2025s in terms of inapp purchase revenue and downloads. This is quite interesting of a matrix of a chart. So we can see that that in terms of inapp purchase revenue, what has really gone down is RPGs and action games in Asia, especially RPG games. And on the other hand, strategy games have gone up in in Asia as well as as they have in North America. We can see the decline of of casino games in North America. Quite significant of a decline in casino games. That's a that's a little bit of a surprising. And we can see the uh the uh the the decline of simulation. At the same time, the unsatiated

need for puzzle games has been has been seen is continuous growth both in North America as well as as as Europe. So strategy seems to be globally uh well not globally it's it's in Asia, North America and Europe. They want themselves we want our ourselves some strategy. And then in terms of uh in terms of the the declines is definitely the simulation, the casino in North America and RPG and action in Asia. Was that a good assessment?
That was a very good summary. So yeah, for the for the audio listeners, we have like a heat map of the um different genres and regions and you can just kind of see where all the growth is and yeah, that was perfect. You did I think an excellent job of summarizing this heat heat map very quickly.
Yeah. And so the report attributes and thank you. The reported tribute is the surge to 4x [snorts] strategy hits. So, shout out to Century Games and other Chinese publishers. Uh,

it seems like they're succeeding pretty much in all the key geographies, right?
Yeah, that is definitely the case. So, um, we did look at take a look quick look at the geo breakout for these uh, Forex strategy games. And so in terms of their revenue, they get um I think like 35% from the US, 12% from Japan, 9% from South Korea, 8% China, 4% Germany, then like 3% the UK. So honestly, that's a pretty nice balance. Pretty similar to I think what we're going to see in the like overall games market or even overall mobile market. Um again, US leading the way with that 35% but followed by those strong um uh Asian markets. Um and one thing that I think is interesting is that if we look at the um our uh games analyst took a look at the top seven we call new wave forex strategy games. So the ones that have launched more recently like Last War, White Out Survival, Kingshot, those kind of games. And the breakout's very similar. So um yeah, very similar

distribution of revenue kind of really strong across all regions right now.
And and all of these are Chinese, right? Um though I say most of them are Chinese or at least from um some uh eastern developers. I believe um Funfly which does Last War is uh based in Singapore I want to say. And then um
come on come on.
I think there's a few that are
game development in Singapore. Let's let's be honest. That's a
Yeah. But at least that's where their headquarters is at least. And we see a few more examples like that too. Like I think um
like Hong Kong.
Yeah. We see a couple. Yeah. I think uh uh I'm probably mispronouncing this, but Florer Game um the publisher of Lassie survival shooter and Dark War
um is I think headquartered in Hong Kong. And then you got um like um I think Top Games which does uh Ebony is also uh headquartered in the US.
Very very interesting. And then Fun Plus that is headquartered in Switzerland

which is uh
yeah too.
I actually don't remember them classified. Oh yes, I'm I'm fair.
Oh, yes, we do have them. You're right. We do. Yes, we do have them in Switzerland. Correct.
Let's Let's just be honest. I'm fairly familiar. I work for Fun Plus. Amazing company. Um they don't make these games out of Switzerland. Nobody makes games out of Switzerland. Yeah, it's one of one of the challenging behind the thing behind the scenes thing for our data sets is um is going through and making sure that the uh the publisher headquarters that we have in the report match what is listed for the p for the for the you know what they publish uh publicly publish for the companies.
Exactly. Exactly. It's just it's a you know play is a Irish company. I get it. Um [laughter] but um I mean we all just laugh. Uh, but talking about Irish companies, Star Trek Fleet Command, that's a Forex game very finely developed out of Dublin, if I remember correctly. What's What's going on with

that? Like, that was The Great White Hope of Forex strategy games. Where is it now? Is it even on the map anymore?
You know, I haven't looked at it recently. So, as we're talking, I can pull it up. Um, but yeah, I mean, in terms of the list of the top games that I was looking at recently, I did not notice it. So, um, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, again, it may have just gotten swallowed swallowed up among all these other really rapid risers. Um, you know, we've seen some some of these other giants that have been, you know, really popular games for a little while or just are starting to kind of get crowded out by the competition a bit.
Yeah. Yeah. The these are massive. Like even looking at Century Games, which is again the developer of uh White Out Survival and Kingshot, the their revenue is already double Supercell and they just released their merge match to game that is climbing up the rank. So So shout out to them uh doing really great work. I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about um about other stuff. So Roblox shows up as a driver of

simulation games in terms of hours in Asia Asia. How should we think about sort of these platform games versus individual games when benchmarking retention and revenue? Because I'm just making this question because there's a there's investment going into these UGC um platforms or UGC gaming platforms with that Roblox notion. So interesting to hear more details about that. Yeah, and I think it's it's a really good point you bring up because if you're trying to like yeah compare it to other just like you know your standard like content games, it's I'd say like not necessarily always the best comparison um because of those differences that you talked about. So for your platform games like Roblox, um I think in terms of trying to benchmark it, you actually probably want to look at it as you know how effective is it as being like the default destination for gaming or for content in general. So even like comparing it to potential other creator platforms like your YouTube and Discord,

Tik Tok um to see you know how is it doing in terms of retention and these other metrics. I think that can almost sometimes be a better comparison for these platform uh type games and you know whereas then you have your of course your other content games that just have that you know that specific loop and progression. they're kind of, you know, one model and I think so of course they're going to monetize differently and you know the user behavior is going to be different. So when comparing I think it is worth separating it out and kind of looking at it in a different light.
Yeah. Um talking about different revenue models in gaming. So hybrid casual that was the the topic of [snorts] I would say 2023 kind of succeeded a little bit in 20 oh 2024. Let's put it this way cuz it's 2026. Um, and when we look at it, so in the graphs, what we see is yearly trends for mobile games by product model. And you have casual, you got mcore, you got

hybrid casual. Um, then you have the that divided into inapp purchase revenue, downloads, and total hours spent. And looking at these graphs, of course, oh, you also have hyper casual, but that's not mentioned in a purchase revenues. So looking at this, we have hybrid casuals with revenues up sign well tangibly. We got casual with revenues down. So I would assume that hybrid casual, which is a lot of puzzle games as well, is taken away from casual revenue. And at the same time, this was really surprising to me. Hyper casual has grown engagement. So how should we read this? is the CPI going up and the CPI CPMs are going up which means inapp ad purchases are going up and that's why hyper casual is doing better and hybrid casual is doing better. Like I'm just making assumptions.
Yeah. Um in terms starting with the hyper casual side of things um we don't have great visibility in terms of like CPIs and things like that. So um it's

hard for us to say for sure. Although again I think the signal that people are spending more time in hyper casual is an interesting one. And as you have more time, theoretically, you should be able to increase that inapp ad revenue as well. Um, and then I think, you know, another thing we're potentially seeing too is that hyper casual can be a nice quick way to test different things for existing hybrid casual or, you know, publishers. Um, they can kind of quickly iterate on different styles to a large user base, test what concepts work, what, you know, ways to add monetization and way to kind of improve these different models over time. it can also be a testing ground for things like that. And so I think that's some of how we're going to see hyper casual games used moving forward as well. On the other side of things too, as as I kind of mentioned with the um you know, potentially if the economic I'm going to say the word the eword again, economic conditions do get worse. Um again that could be something where we see maybe a little bit more of a shift more towards

um ad revenue if you know consumers are going to be a little bit more cautious in terms of their inapp purchase spend on a macro level. Right. Again some of these trends might be you know fairly small on an individual player basis. Yeah, because looking at these graphs, it h it was definitely surprising to see the total hours spent as well as the downloads increase for hyper casual game because I feel like we collectively in the industry or at least the people I interact with kind of wrote them off like, okay, they're done and dusted. It's all about hybrid casual and now they're back on the growth path. So, I was trying to get my my head around it. like as you mentioned economic factor for sure then the the market saturation and concentration which has led to rise con rise of CPIs naturally in my head would put more value to advertising dollars and through that make it again a more tangible business model
yeah I could see that for sure and again

I also do think there's there's that potential value of using it as like a testing ground and also potentially again cross promotion so you can start users that players there and kind of graduate them into potentially a hybrid casual model or casual uh model from there. So I think it's it's an interesting we're seeing some interesting use cases right now for the hyper casual model for sure.
And you mentioned a few times during this podcast that you are the breakouts. So what type of a sensor towel sensor tower tool or feature do you use to find out breakouts?
Yeah. Uh, so one of my favorites is to just we I mean it's it's a simple one is our top apps tool, but just filter the games and then go whatever time period you're interested in and filter by growth. So like for example, one thing I'll often do is look at the last 30 or 90 days, filter downloads or revenue growth and then you just get a list. You'll you'll see a lot of if you do like raw growth, um you'll see a lot of the big players in there or you could do percent growth which is a lot of the

smaller players. But it's a nice way to just really quickly see what's gaining traction um right now. And then also um see if you can see any patterns there too. So you can kind of break it out by whatever classification you want, right? You can filter by product model, you can filter by genre um or subgenre. And so a lot of different ways. Oh yes, thank you for pulling it up. Um you pull up the platform here. Um, so that's typically how I I like to look at it and just see honestly a lot of times I just look and see look for games I don't recognize because then those are the ones that are probably the new releases that are hitting the ground running.
Yeah. And so here I'm doing a quick analysis on is it is it merge or or match too or which one is it? So basically I go to genre taxonomy and I will assume it's in lifestyle and puzzle and then I go to puzzle which I assume it's there.
And we actually do we do combat merge too. We do both.
Oh no.

Uh so
maybe we do that for uh for searching capabilities. So you can Yeah. So you if you search either it'll show up. [laughter]
Yeah. So marriage match merge to and then you can look at the last 30 days, the last 60 days. So here I'm I'm taking the last 12 months in match merge two category and what you can see here is Jesus Christ Gossip Harbor pulling in $74 million in net revenue.
Yeah. So that means based on our calculations we basically divide by 7. So that's a billion in gross revenue.
Yeah. and their second title, which is the the their bastard title, Micro Funds Seaside Escape, only $210 million in the same period of time. So, collectively, they're pulling in in net revenue a billion dollars with just two titles.
Yeah, it's just it's yeah, been an incredible [clears throat] rise.
Nasty, nasty, nasty success. Anyways, good for them uh and others.

[laughter and gasps] Um okay, last element of of uh of this presentation. I think I have one one more slide I wanted to discuss with you. And this is of course our favorite thing, ads. How could we not cover ads? [laughter] So, um let me open it up here. Boom. Um and looking at the uh the ads graph. So we have a couple of things going on here. So this is uh a a graph that so shows the ad mix con concentrating into fewer platform and formats. Uh it compares the year 2024 to year 2025. What we can see here is massive rise in video as well as doubling of playable ads. And this is all at the expense of image ads. Again, in terms of ratios, uh

we see rewarded uh impressions going significantly up. So, rewarded ads uh from about 12% to 18%. And then overall, when looking at different ad networks and impressions per share, we can see that Instagram is doing better and met better and Facebook as well is is really climbing up in terms of social platforms. Actually, let's put it this way. Meta dominates uh when it comes to social sharing. Tik Tok uh YouTube is also ran in in this in this segment. And when it comes to inapp advertising, uh apploving is second in size, grown quite nicely year-over-year. There's integral, but ADM Mob is still the the king giving the current trajectory. um Applovin will take the spot in about a year or two.

So that's that's my summary of this big slide and I had some questions. So video is still dominating but the playables have gained meaningful share uh rewarded shares up as I said. How does this really change the creative strategy for uh different genre of the games? Yeah, it's an interesting question and honestly when I looked into this it actually surprised me a little bit. Um, hybrid or hyper casual is actually shifting kind of the reverse of this trend is actually shifting a little bit more towards images and playables a little bit as well but less less video whereas we're really seeing that the main shift towards videos coming from casual and midcore which I think is interesting. Um, you know, I think it suggests that the the AIP models are the ones that are kind of leaning in more heavily to these more immersive formats, whereas, you know, you're seeing your hyper casual, you know, primarily using things like uh

image ads, but then using these videos and playables a little bit more sparingly. um playables are still using some just to get I think you obviously with the the simple game play. Um it can be a nice way to onboard people with the the get a nice sense of what the game's going to be like um and make it yeah easier for them to download. Um but yeah, it's an interesting mix where um again we're seeing the shift mostly come from the casual and midcore side of things. And can you see which sub genres are overbought or underpriced right now? Yeah, it's hard for us to see that exactly, but we can see basically um one thing we did in this report is compare um revenue uh versus advertising and shares and try to see get a sense of um you know where we're seeing more advertising than is you know uh then scales to the the revenue and the um you know I think

a good example of that is we if we look at in the US um 50% % sorry 56% of US um mobile game ad spend went to lifestyle and puzzle but only 41% of um inapp purchase revenue came from lifestyle and puzzle. So again it suggests that a lot of these publishers I mean you know the it's still a huge genre obviously for revenue. So, we're seeing a lot of these um you know, a lot of game developers competing for these users um you know, potentially advertising actually more than the current revenue that it's making. And you know, we see the reverse trend for some of these other other genres.
Oh, like if we're being really hyperbolic, we could call it race to the bottom.
Yeah. And then I just think Yeah. Again, it's just um like there's almost like these uh you know, this is C casual is still obviously the largest um revenue source and so I think you have a lot of

people trying to and you know it does still have really big upside, right? So, a lot of people are trying to compete for this space.
Yeah. But I I'd make this case like looking at from investors perspective um or just market competition perspective like let's say match three games that are probably the biggest share of the revenue in the lifestyle and puzzle segment. You have titles like Royal Match that are doing extremely well but also when they started the CPIs were considerably lower. I would assume when when Royal Match came out, the CPIs are probably were somewhere around $10, maybe $12 per per user. And now they're climbing in towards $30 per user. If you're an upstart and you'd say, "Hey, I want to challenge this title. I want to take a piece of that that fat pie." For you to grow is so much more expensive than it was for Royal Match that I don't think that your unit economics are for it. Even for you to

soft launch, you'd have to pay 10 million bucks at least to get the numbers right, to get your progression right, and you have to do these adjustments. Meanwhile, this game has data for like what, six, seven years. Uh so, so the disadvantage to entering markets so late when the unit economics are incredibly competitive is almost um a barrier for entry.
Yeah, it really is. And so I think what we're going to see is maybe a shift where we see more I mean again really specific like targeted releases in the on the you know the the casual side of things. So I mean there were again we mentioned like Gossip Harbor is being a recent success. Um but like you know uh Disney Solitaire is another example I wanted to bring up just because it was the I think the number 28 casual game after launching it of course was a Disney IP and is dominating the solitire genre. And it's not even that. I want to jump in on that Disney solitary piece because that actually in some case

proves the point because it's it's by Superplay
and they had a previous title. I think it was called Dice Dreams or some other ones that that essentially is the same game as Disney Solitire. It wasn't Dice Dreams. It was their second game. Uh Domino Dreams, I think. And they reskin it. They put a an IP that has way lower of a CPI, much wider of an audience reach, but they already have the data from the previous one. So that limits the risk and they don't have to pay so much for the new users. They don't have to run a long soft launch to figure out how the game works. They already know it. Now they're just playing the CPI game. They already know their LTBs. They know everything. And so the the sort of a head start that you get in terms of data is crucial in a market where the unit economics are different. It might have taken $2 billion for Royal Match to reach where they are right now, but it will take5 billion or $6 billion for you to get in the same place and suddenly you're unprofitable.

Yeah, that's actually a really great example. I I did not realize that. And that's really interesting about how they were kind of able to um yeah, kind of take advantage of the their previous learnings and the data they already had to get that head start. That's really interesting. Um so yeah, overall I think you're right. I think if we're looking at, you know, you want to invest in a game, hybrid casual is kind of the safer bet. That's where we're seeing the revenue growth. It's smaller. Um, but if you just, you know, kind of want to have that area that you can kind of enter into a little bit more safely, um, I think it's the way to go for sure.
What else would you invest? Like my last question would be is like Jonathan like somebody at a at a big VC firm is listening to this and like this Jonathan guy has he's really has his finger on the pulse. He knows every single genre in mobile not even mobile gaming. Uh where Jonathan you would like give me three investment areas uh in mobile business today.

Okay that's that's an interesting question I think. So, starting with the gaming side of things, I'm curious what you think about this one because again, honestly, we just mentioned uh Star Trek Fleet Command and the challenges there. I still think there's there's growth potential in the Forex strategy game genre. You know, we talked about comparing uh ad revenue to or ad, you know, ad spend to ad share to inapp purchase revenue and it's still in the green where it's making more money than its proportionate share of ad revenue or ad spend. Um, so I think there's potential growth there and I am curious if someone is actually able to successfully um, find the right IP to match with the Forex strategy genre right now because among the top players, we don't currently have that. Um, so if you can successfully create, you know, that kind of new wave forex strategy game with a powerful IP that helps broaden that initial appeal and reach even further than it already is, I think it could succeed. Again, it's going to be it's a challenge. We haven't seen it

before, but I think there's that potential there.
Okay, so first one is we're putting in um big IP, global IP for let's let's do it. Clash of Clans 4X. So that's that's number one. [laughter]
Yep.
What what then?
Um I'll stick let's stick with the gaming side of things right now, too. Um, I do think, you know, we we did look at that uh the Match Marge 2 genre and we mentioned Gossip Harbor and we looked at um Mer and Cook. I think there's still potential for other games there too. I when you were pulling up the top games, you noticed there's a lot of other ones too that are growing really quickly. Um so just given how quickly Gossip Harbor rose and it's got, you know, we've got I think like uh Merge Cooking and Tasty Travels. So a lot of food themed one. There's Flam Bay I believe. Um, I think there's still potential there is too. So, that's another another uh area.
Yeah,
got it.
Maybe another IP. They don't have any IP

games.
Yeah. No,
where's where's Disney merge too? I
Yeah, exactly. Some some sort of Disney food themed game. Maybe a good combination there.
Anything. Anything. I want to I want to combine lamps for Alid Alladin or you know, you name it. They have endless IPs. And then I'd say um well maybe I'll give you a bonus one because I did so I did three gaming for this one. So then I'll do one in the non-gaming side. So last gaming one I think is just um kind of the hybrid casual puzzle combination of product model and genre. Um we're also seeing grow really quickly sword any kind of a sword game.
Yeah we've got them like I think like color block jam screwdom match factory. Um, yes. And again, I think it's just it can be a nice way to kind of get yourself some exposure to that hybrid casual model. Um,
okay. So, you gave me three biggest growing uh genres. I was kind of hoping like a like something that is overlooked, but okay, I'll take this. These are the biggest biggest chunks of

money. What what what would be investing outside gaming?
So, outside of gaming, I think the main thing to watch and um so on the gaming side, I'll give me more time to think about it for uh our before state of gaming so I can give you a better answer. And so I'll come up with something a little bit more off the map there. Um for non-gaming I would say um we're looking at just AI because it's everywhere I think is so important. So what I'm really monitoring is how apps that are outside of AI assistance are using AI to improve the apps. So some examples are like um we saw last year nutrition and diet were apps were really quick to add like AI powered calorie counters.
Yes.
Food logging. So,
it's phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal. I use that myself.
Can't can't rave enough about it. Best usage of AI is taking photos. And people like, "Why are you taking all these photos of your food?" I'm like, "I'm not. This is not Instagram. [snorts] This is my macro mac.
You're just Yeah, you're just taking a

photo of your your your uh your perfectly designed plate." Um,
it doesn't look that good. But it's like [laughter]
um so yeah, again that's that's the area where I'm watching is like what other areas can these app developers find these really useful AI features like those that can kind of just be immediately like huge value ads because you know we started off this whole conversation talking about um monetization and revenue and people are willing to pay for features that are really valuable to them. I think with AI, those types of features are going to just become way more common and I'm just really excited to kind of see where where that goes.
AI photo app and video editing apps. Would that be good?
Um, so that's something I mean we've that honestly something we've been seeing for a while. Like you think of like the hair like the hair changing apps or like where you can do makeup and things like that. Yeah, I'm using the hair changing app all the time and then

[laughter] and then uh and then the tattoo apps and like I uh I got this uh from PGC, one of the founders, former gamer founder now AI founder as they tend to go. He gave me this um this app and again multiple microtransactions because you have to subscribe to each packages and it's like you're putting your photos in and you can edit yourself like you can there's like a thematic packages there's like an Arabia package for example where I'm like doing all the fun stuff and then there's the Miami package and then there's the uh the you know super villain superhero and and it really puts you through all those photos and you can generate photos with essentially that theme package. Yeah, I think I mean those again though we see a lot of those already. So I could see those expand and even like um some of the even maybe more professional like photo editing apps are starting to add AI features um that can like really help speed up some of these processes. Um honestly I've tested a few out and it feels like there's still some work to be done. You know again if you're talking

about like professionally editing photos they need to be like higher quality of course or like you know it needs to actually do things like a user would do. And I think, you know, some of those are just have a little bit of a steeper learning curve in my experience for these AI models. Um, but yeah, I could see like as it gets more sophisticated, I feel like the use cases are just really going to expand. Yeah, I would I would look into something that actually has a niche rather than a big audience in the beginning and just uh drops off the cliff like you know the lovables of the world probably where you know essentially they're saying that anybody can make an app and everybody tries and nobody can succeed and the ARR just just dive nose dive. The same thing I feel like is happening with these photo apps. It's like sure I'll I'll make myself in Miami. I'll do myself as a knight and I'll do something else. And then where am I going to post those? Am I going to use them that much? And after a while just it's just like not an ideal. But then again, if you're a content creator and you're creating a specific tool for

content creators where they're getting utility, maybe it's some kind of a combination of subtitles and bals and so forth, like now it's a tool that these content creators will be using month over month and you can keep increasing and improving that product so that it creates a moat where specific niche is willing to pay for them, you Yeah, I think and even following up on that, I think because it's a really good point like you mentioned like like these hair changing apps and things like that, a lot of these features are going to then be adopted by Gemini by Cat TBT. If they're pretty low barrier to entry, pretty easy filters is like in more broad then we are going to see those kind of get in swallowed up by these AI giants. Whereas if you're more um you're you know like you mentioned having these more tailored niche use cases I think that's exactly where you know you're going to see these apps kind of be able to to separate themselves and distance themselves from competitors.

Sorry Jonathan my daughter came in requesting YouTube kids she has now been given and now she has left and I shall edit this out. [laughter] I think it's only only fair given our YouTube discussion. So
yes yeah that has entered the fray. Um all right Jonathan this was remarkable as always huge kudos to entire sensor tower team for creating these massive amazing reports that people can interact with get insights um build their own conviction and question their own decision. So, thank you so much for for releasing this and thank you so much for spending 90 minutes with me talking about just nine of the graphs that you have on on this amazing deck. So, thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you for having me. I had a blast and uh hopefully we can do this again next year for State of Mobile 2027, which already scares me to even talk about, but it'll be it'll be fun.

State of Yes. So, yeah, we do have State of Gaming, so people look out for that. is coming up in uh just about a month. So, and this year we're going to expand from our state of mobile gaming into state of gaming more broadly. We have some more, you know, some additional like PC console gaming data sets. So, yeah, look out for that. Some more additional gaming data this year to to hopefully uh be of interest to all of you. Well, folks, hold on to your pants. We're going to cover state of gaming a little bit later, but till then you got 100 pages of state of mobile link in the description below. Get it, check it out, share it with your team, use sensor tower to find your profitable niches. So, on that note, thanks again, Jonathan, for coming on and thank you everybody for listening. Thanks for listening to the full episode. Now, did you know that Dee Constructor of Fun isn't just your favorite industry podcast? [music] We're also a bit of a consulting powerhouse.

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