44 stats and facts on apps in 2025

Back in 2016, we published an article comprising 44 facts about mobile apps. Of course, the world has changed dramatically since then – not only politically, economically and environmentally, but digitally. Social media platforms have had meteoric rises and falls, fact checking and deep fakes are daily headlines, and Artificial Intelligence is shocking stock markets and permeating all aspects of society.

The number of apps being downloaded has also doubled over that time. In 2016 – the year of PokemonGO, Brexit and Trump’s first election win – there were 80 billion app downloads. In 2024, it had risen to twenty times the number of people on this planet: 165 billion.

Amid all this disruption and innovation, we felt like it was a good time to retake the temperature of the global app market. Here are some of the most interesting, mind-boggling and surprising facts and stats we have found to whet your APPetite…

• In 2025, globally, there are expected to be a further 173 billion app downloads (a number said to also be the cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s “midlife crisis makeover”).
• Not quite as eye-watering as the half-a-trillion dollars mobile apps generated in revenue in 2024.
• On the subject of trillions, an astonishing 5.1 trillion hours were spent using mobile apps in 2023.
• For context, that is equal to 570 million years, which is how long ago it was when all life on Earth was aquatic.
• In the UK, 98% of adults aged 16-24 own a smartphone.
• As do (worryingly) almost a quarter of 5-7-year-olds and half of nine-year-olds.
• The average American checks their phone 205 times a day – once every five minutes – and 66% use their phone while on the toilet…
• Let’s hope they aren’t as clumsy as us Brits, then, who drop over 1.8 million phones down the toilet each year.
• The average American had 18.28 apps in 2024.
• Which is expected to decline to 18.11 in 2025 and 17.8 by 2027 (shall we just call it a steady 18?)
• Over half a million people download Meta mobile apps every day, but we wonder if Meta ending its third-party fact-checking programme will prompt a reaction this year…
• Many of these people have a love-hate relationship with Instagram, which was both the most popular and most deleted app in 2023 – downloaded 696 million times and deleted by over one 1 billion users.
• But 2024 made way for a new Queen of the Apps, TikTok, which was downloaded more than 825 million times over the year (its 170 million US users will no doubt be breathing a sigh of relief now Trump has wielded his new presidential powers to delay a federal ban).
• By the end of 2024, around an eighth of the global population (1.8 billion) is expected to be active on TikTok every month.
• They post around 34 million videos a day – around 272 every second.
• Apple’s App Store generated more revenue than Google Play in the second quarter of 2024 – $24.6bn and $11.2bn respectively.
• On average, 47,000 Android and 39,000 iOS apps are released every month – 97% of which are free.
• On the other end of the spectrum, the most expensive app on the App Store belongs to CyberTuner, which you wouldn’t want to accidentally download for $999.99.
• Gaming has exploded in popularity since our last round-up, now accounting for 12% of all apps on both the App Store and Google Play.

• Gaming has exploded in popularity since our last round-up, now accounting for 12% of all apps on both the?App Store?and?Google Play.
• Roblox was the most-downloaded game in 2023, with?217 million downloads
• More than?90 million?people all over the world were out catching Pokemon every month in 2024.
• Fortnite, meanwhile, has amassed over half a billion (650 million) registered users since its release in 2017, with 1.1 million people playing in an average day.
• Behind gaming, the most popular?Apple App Store categories?in 2024, by global share, were Business (10.4%), Education (9.8%) and Utilities (9.2%).
• The least popular categories in 2024 were Productivity (4.8%), Health & Fitness (5%) and Shopping (5.3%).
• That’s not to say Brits have given up shopping on apps completely; in 2023, Chinese marketplace Temu had?20 million downloads, making it the most popular shopping app in the UK.
• Second-hand clothing app Vinted was next in line with?8.9 million, followed by fast fashion retailer Shein with 7.4 million.
• While Apple wins on share of revenue, the Google Play app store is responsible for about?77% of mobile app downloads?worldwide.
• Google Maps has over?one billion monthly active users?contributing to more than?20 million?pieces of information every day, equal to more than 200 contributions every second.
• Solar-powered sheep?have played their part in map app data-gathering too – over in the Faroe Islands where there are more sheep than people, 360-degree cameras attached to sheep have been used to capture images of the land.
• Dogs could also soon be alerting communities to natural disasters, with this?smart collar?collecting pet health data that could indicate potential earthquakes – genius.
• Of the?350 million people?who used dating apps in 2023, location-based app Tinder was the most popular with over?58 million downloads.
• Location-based apps are not only handy for dating of course, with?161 million?people worldwide using the Uber app at least once per month in Q3 2024.

• With over?12 million downloads, Tesco Groceries was by far the most popular food delivery app in the UK in 2023, followed by Just Eat with 2.4 million.
• Our prize for the weirdest location-based app, though, goes to?Places I’ve Pooped, which quite literally does what it says on the tin (or toilet).
• While some people like to use apps to let them know the best time to?run to the toilet during films, others like to use them to track their running.
• Fitness tracker apps are indeed booming, attracting 368 million users and 850 million downloads in 2023.
• In 2024, community running app Strava recorded?135 million users?across 190 countries.
• Unfortunately we know the ease, convenience and opportunity that smartphones and apps afford isn’t without cost…
• They are contributing to the Global Datasphere (a measure of how much data is created, captured, replicated and consumed each year), which is estimated to grow from 45 zettabytes (ZB) in 2019 to?175 ZB in 2025.
• All this inevitably has an impact on global warming, with mobile apps generating around?0.75 grams of CO2 equivalent emissions.
• To put that into perspective, if five billion users spend three hours daily on apps (the global average is around 3-5), they contribute to?6% of digital CO2 emissions.
• Browsers tend to be the?worst offenders, with surfing the web zapping our smartphones twice as fast as calling.
• And?TikTok?is the most energy-consuming social network (not just for those uploading all those dancing videos), chugging over 130 MB of data for one minute.
• With AI predicted to play a role in?85% of all app interactions in 2025, there will be some examples of the technology used responsibly and to help us navigate the most pressing challenges of our times (which may or may not include chatbots voiced by the likes of?Dame Judi Dench…)

Well, we hope your appetite has been sufficiently whetted and we’ve given you plenty of food for thought for the year ahead. We will be keeping a close watch on how the landscape changes and the opportunities emerge, as well as where Calvium can play a meaningful role.

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