How many apps in the App Store offer a subscription?

Subscriptions are a great way to make money from your app. Most developers already know this, but how many apps (and games) are monetized with subscriptions?

AppFigures analyzed all apps available in the App Store and currently 232k products offer at least one recurring in-app purchase (aka subscription). This means that 15% of all apps and games currently available on the App Store work with subscriptions.

Which categories have the most subscription apps? Perhaps the answer will surprise you. These are games.

The category with the most subscriptions is Games, with 31% of all games in the App Store having a subscription.

Almost all of the top-grossing games have a subscription, and it’s hardly surprising that this is the largest category. It took a while for game developers to understand and implement subscriptions, but once they did, the floodgates opened and revenues began to flow.

According to App Intelligence, more than 1,500 games have made over $100,000 in the last 30 days, and that’s net profit, which is what the publishers of these games keep for themselves after they give Apple their cut.

Education is the second largest category with a 13% subscription share , followed by Utilities at 7%.

Next come the Health & Fitness, Entertainment, Productivity, Lifestyle, Photo & Video, and Social categories, with shares in single digits.

The category “Business”, which could be expected to be among the leaders, was in 10th place with a share of subscription applications of only 3%. At first glance, this seems wrong, but when you consider that many applications in the Business category are clients for platforms that run on the Internet, this situation becomes more clear.