The consumer spending on Apple App Store and Google Play Store is set to grow at 19.7 percent to $133 billion in 2021 from $111.1 billion in 2020.
The consumer spending on the Apple App Store will increase 17.7 percent to $85.1 billion in 2021 from $72.3 billion in 2020.
The consumer spending on Google Play will grow 23.5 percent to $47.9 billion from $38.8 billion, said Sensor Tower, which provides market intelligence and analytics for the mobile app economy.
The two platforms’ spending relative to each other remains the same as in 2020, with the App Store seeing about 1.8 times the revenue as Google’s marketplace, said Stephanie Chan, mobile insights strategist.
TikTok, including Douyin on iOS in China, will maintain its dominance as the non-game app that saw the most revenue across both app stores combined.
The ByteDance-owned short video platform passed $3 billion in lifetime revenue earlier this year. TikTok app registered $2 billion in revenue in the first 11 months of 2021, up 67 per cent on-year from $1.2 billion.
Sensor Tower forecasts that the TikTok app will see $2.3 billion in spending by the end of the year, bringing its lifetime total to $3.8 billion.
TikTok is the most downloaded app on the App Store for 2021, racking up 745.9 million installs across both app stores.
On Google Play, Facebook tops the charts with about 500.9 million installs on that marketplace alone.
On Android devices, Google One continued to see the most revenue in 2021.
By the end of 2021, the app will reach $1 billion in consumer spending, up 123 percent from $448.5 million in 2020.
First-time installs remain relatively flat when compared to 2020, growing 0.5 per cent across the App Store and Google Play to 143.6 billion in 2021 from 142.9 billion in 2020.
This is driven mainly by app adoption on Google Play, which will see installs climb 2.6 per cent to 111.3 billion from 108.5 billion; Apple’s marketplace will generate about 32.3 billion installs this year, down 6.1 percent from 34.4 billion.