From the chart we see YouTube tops the chart at $2.1 billion in revenue and ChatGPT makes it to the second top grossing app on iOS store. Its revenue is driven almost entirely by the “ChatGPT Plus” subscription, proving a massive appetite for premium AI features on mobile.
Most top earners maintain high ratings (4.5+), suggesting that the “pay-to-win” or “subscription-heavy” models are well-received by their core user bases. Tinder remains an outlier with a lower 3.8 rating, often due to user frustration with matchmaking algorithms despite high spending.
Despite being “apps,” mobile games like Honor of Kings and Monopoly GO! continue to represent more than half of the top 10. Monopoly GO! recently made headlines for reaching the $6 billion milestone across all platforms faster than any other mobile game in history.
The plot indicates a weak positive correlation between an app’s average rating and its total revenue.
- R-squared ($R^2$) Value: ~0.26. This suggests that only about 26% of the variance in revenue can be explained by the average rating.
- Trend: While the regression line slopes upward (suggesting higher-rated apps tend to earn more), the data points are quite dispersed.
- Outliers: * Tinder is a notable outlier with the lowest rating (3.8) but still maintaining a high revenue position, likely due to its dominant market share in the dating category.
- Ratings are not a key factor in revenues of apps and other factors are in play.
Source: Google Gemini