How apps make money

A paid app or game asks for money once, before the download. Stardew Valley, a farming game, sells for $4.99 on the US App Store, with nothing to buy inside. Every download pays, but a price means fewer people try it, and a player who keeps playing for years never pays again.

Most apps are free to download. A free game earns from in-app purchases: coins, lives, levels, or a one-time payment to remove the ads. An app paid for by ads earns a little each time a player sees one. A subscription app charges every month or year.

Many apps mix them. Duolingo, the language-learning app, shows free learners an ad at the end of each lesson, sells subscriptions, and sells extras inside the app. Subscriptions were 84.2% of its 2025 revenue.

On a phone, most purchases go through the app store, and the store keeps a share before the rest reaches the developer. Apple's standard commission is 30%. Developers who earn up to $1M a year after the commission can join Apple's Small Business Program and pay 15% instead.

Google Play's US fees changed in 2026: on a developer's first $1M a year, its service fee is 10%, plus a 5% billing fee on purchases through Google's billing. So a small studio keeps about $0.85 of each dollar a player spends through either store.

Money from ads doesn't go through the store. The ad network that sells the ads keeps its own share instead, and Google doesn't publish AdMob's share.

Big game companies also sell on their own websites. Playtika, a maker of free mobile games, does, and it says card fees there typically run 3–4%. It took in 29.6% of its 2025 revenue through its own stores.

In a free game, most players never pay. Playtika's games, like Slotomania and Bingo Blitz, had 8.5 million players a day on average in 2025, and on an average day only 4.4% of them bought something.

Those few carry the rest. Spread over every player, a day's player brought Playtika $0.89. Its games are mostly casino-style and casual games, whose payers spend a lot; other games differ, but the shape is the same: a small share of players brings in most of the money.

That's why free games sell cheap starter packs to turn a player into a payer, and why they work hard to keep the players who pay.

A single ad view pays very little, so an app paid for by ads needs a lot of players, every day. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, makes its money mainly from ads: in the last three months of 2025 it took in $3.62 per daily user, about $0.039 a day.

What one ad pays changes with the country, the kind of ad and the time of year. Ads players choose to watch for a reward, like an extra life, tend to bother them less than ads that interrupt.

Selling in the stores starts with two accounts: the Apple Developer Program costs $99/year, and a Google Play developer account $25, once. A new personal Google Play account must also run a closed test with 12 testers for 14 days in a row before it can publish.

A person can sell under their own legal name, which then shows as the seller. To sell as a studio, the company has to be registered first, and both stores ask a company for a D-U-N-S Number, a business ID from Dun & Bradstreet. Apple doesn't accept a trade name that isn't a company.

Then the money comes late. Apple pays within 45 days after its fiscal month ends, and Google around the middle of the next month. Before that, there are months of building with no pay: a software developer's median pay was $135,980/year in May 2025, which is what that time is worth elsewhere. The free lesson walks through a studio's cash before its first payout and lets you plan a month of your own app's money.