These are the highest grossing apps in the U.S.

SurveyMonkey Intelligence
3 min readDec 7, 2016

By Priceonomics

Though payments to download apps are now the most important source of revenue in the app market, data shows that an increasingly-large portion of app developer income is coming from in-app purchase revenue.

Which apps are driving the rise of in-app revenue? We used SurveyMonkey Intelligence data to find the highest grossing apps for in-app purchases on iOS and Android in the U.S. market.

While the app market is growing quickly, it is constantly changing. Of the top 25 grossing apps, six were released in the last year, and three were released in the last six months.

With its mind-blowing revenue stats, Pokémon GO tops the in-app purchases chart. Bringing in over two million dollars a day, the game exclusively uses in-app purchases to generate revenue — for now, anyway. Niantic, the maker of the game, has announced that in-game advertising is coming soon.

Beyond the Niantic phenomenon, the top in-app purchase earners are mainly freemium games — games that are free to download, but which require payments for premium features. Popular freemium games Mobile strike and Game of War — Fire Age both make over a million dollars per day.

About 30% of the top 25 list are casino-style games, such as Slotomania, which makes about two million dollars per week. As with the addictive strategy games at the top of the list, users purchase upgrades and consumables to accelerate their progress in-game or to enable content that is otherwise unavailable.

Ridesharing and online marketplace apps are notably absent from the list because both Apple and Google consider physical services to be external goods rather than in-app purchases. That’s good news for Uber and Amazon, since this designation means they don’t get charged 30% per purchase by the app store owner.

While in-app purchases were dominated by games, we were curious about which apps got the most subscription revenue.

Most of the apps with high subscription revenues offer streaming media or dating opportunities. The top three apps are Spotify ($6.4 million in revenue per week), Netflix, and HBO NOW. The dating app Tinder is fourth on this list; it earns $1.7 million per week in subscription revenue.

While the subscription revenues of Spotify and Tinder are dwarfed by the in-app revenues of games like Pokemon Go, subscription revenue is set to become much more important in the coming years. Both Apple and Google have reduced their fees for subscription revenue from 30% to 15% (while other fees will stay at 30%). In response, we may see more developers embrace a subscription-based revenue model.

This post originally appeared on September 13, 2016 on the blog of SurveyMonkey Intelligence, a provider of competitive intelligence for the mobile app industry.

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