Numbers · Published 2026-04-10 · 3 min read
The RevenueCat 2026 report: what it means for user acquisition
RevenueCat has published its state of the mobile industry report. There is a lot of interesting material in it.
Growth in the number of apps. RevenueCat put this fact on the opening pages, and it really is striking. The number of subscription app launches on iOS has grown roughly sevenfold:
- 2,000 in January 2022,
- 14,700 in January 2026.
Android is growing twice as slowly.
Interpretation
If you launch an app in 2026, you can hardly count on organic. With 14,700 releases a month the competition is very high. At the same time the User Acquisition Chat has around 6,800 members, and that number has barely changed in recent years. One might suppose that the growth in the number of developers is not matched by comparable growth in the number of UA managers — though of course I would like the growth to be comparable. Perhaps these new developers will level up and we will see it yet.
But for now competition in paid UA is growing more slowly than the number of apps, which means the door for new apps with paid UA is still open.
Incidentally, a sevenfold rise in the number of apps is most likely a measure of how much more productive developers have become thanks to vibe coding.
Revenue distribution
- 69% of revenue comes from apps released before 2020.
- 8% of revenue comes from apps released after 2024.
This may point to inertia in the store's algorithms. When analysing competitors it is worth taking the release date into account — older apps are growing under different conditions. And the best, if slightly toxic, advice for increasing an app's organic is: launch in 2019.
Web funnels. «…it's not because small apps can't do it. It's because they haven't tried yet» — RevenueCat.
RevenueCat notes explosive growth in the use of web funnels in 2025.
At the same time
- web-to-app is growing, that is, taking payments from web traffic on the site, but
- app-to-web scenarios, paying on the site from inside the app, are still rare,
- and around two thirds of web revenue comes from the United States, concentrated in a limited number of verticals.
We discuss this often on consultations. When clients ask whether they need web funnels, I answer: it depends on your niche. Health, fitness, education and parenting, for example, sit firmly on quizzes, while photo apps and cleaners have almost none.
The answer lies in competitor analysis.
In this channel I do not, probably wrongly, review web funnels, but we do launch them with clients. I will write about it.
LTV. The report gives LTV by niche and geo. There are no surprises here — the values match practical observation.
Google versus Apple
- LTV day 1:
iOS $0.42 versus Android $0.23.
- LTV one year:
iOS $23.38 versus Android $21.62.
So the difference in traffic quality between Google and Apple narrows over a long horizon. In its report RevenueCat measures all traffic, including organic. I think that in paid traffic — Meta, for instance — the differences may be even less pronounced.
In summary
- The number of apps is growing, which increases the value of paid traffic.
- Web funnels are used more and more often, but there are few niches where they apply.
- LTV across platforms looks similar over a long horizon.