Top Grossing Apps of 2025 And The Monetization Playbook Behind Them

Hundreds of thousands of apps fight for attention, but a small group quietly captures most of the revenue. Their tactics are consistent even when their products look very different. In October 2025, Instagram was the most downloaded app worldwide with 52 million installs, which is a good reminder that downloads and revenue do not always line up the same way.

In 2025, TikTok leads global mobile revenue with roughly $2.5 billion, turning short-form video into a repeatable monetization engine. Google One brings in around $1.8 billion by bundling cloud storage and device protection into a sticky subscription. YouTube adds roughly $1.6 billion, and Disney+ contributes about $1.2 billion from streaming alone. On the AI and productivity side, ChatGPT reaches about $879 million through tiered plans and enterprise access. Games still punch above their weight in the overall charts too: Honor of Kings alone generates roughly $1.2 billion in 2025.

Connected TV tells a similar story. Hulu leads U.S. connected TV monetization in September 2025, generating the highest open programmatic ad revenue across Roku, Samsung Smart TV, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV. The pattern is the same across these leaders: recurring value, clear upgrade paths, and constant iteration driven by data instead of guesswork.

Here’s a snapshot of the apps and their primary monetization model.

At AppMakers USA, that’s the part we pay attention to, it’s how these teams layer subscriptions, ads, and premium features without breaking the experience for the people actually paying.

Blockbuster mobile games do not just entertain; they run like live services with economies, events, and content drops that keep people spending month after month. The top of the charts is less about one-off launches and more about who can sustain a system that prints predictable revenue over time.

In 2025, MONOPOLY GO! leads with around $2.21 billion in mobile revenue, proving that a familiar IP plus aggressive live-ops and social loops can outrun older franchises. Around it, long-running titles and platform-style games such as Roblox keep pulling in cash by treating “the game” as an ecosystem—UGC, social hangouts, and endless ways to spend inside one world instead of shipping a new app every year.

Further down the charts, 4X strategy games like Last War and Whiteout Survival show how well deep progression, alliances, and timed events convert invested players into long-term payers. At the same time, match and hyper-casual puzzle titles quietly generate steady revenue from a smaller core of dedicated spenders. The surface looks simple, but the monetization under the hood is anything but.

At AppMakers USA, we look at how these teams combine live events, social pressure, cosmetics, and progression into systems that can survive years of updates. You are not trying to clone MONOPOLY GO! or Roblox, but you can borrow the logic. It’s the recurring reasons to come back, clear upgrade paths, and spending that feels connected to progress, not random paywalls.

Once you stop staring at global charts and zoom into regions, “top grossing” starts to look very local. The leaders change, the categories shift, and the way people pay is completely different from market to market.

In Australia, you see a mixed stack near the top: ChatGPT, HBO Max, AliExpress, Klarna, and myGov. That lineup tells you something: productivity, streaming, ecommerce, fintech, and even government services can all dominate when they solve real day-to-day problems and run well across phones, web, and connected devices. Cloud adoption and cross-platform builds are part of why these apps feel present everywhere, not just on one screen.

In India and Southeast Asia, the winners are even more obviously local. Kuku TV, Meesho, JioHotstar, PhonePe, and Seekho show up high on the charts because they lean hard into local content, social commerce, cricket and regional sports, UPI-driven payments, and career education. Cheap data plus local languages plus local payment rails add up to products that feel built for the region instead of lightly translated exports.

In the Nordics, you get a different mix again: entertainment, lifestyle, and secure messaging apps share the stage, while gaming titles still pull in most of the Google Play revenue and set the bar for engagement and monetization across categories. Even there, privacy expectations, platform preferences, and local culture shape which apps can break into the top-grossing slots.

From our side at AppMakers USA, this isn’t trivia; it is a roadmap for how you plan features and monetization. A region-first approach looks more like this:

• Map the leading categories and winners by country before you lock your feature list.
• Localize properly—language, pricing, holidays, and trust signals, not just copy.
• Build growth loops around local influencers, creators, and payment rails, instead of assuming one global funnel will work everywhere.
• Prototype in one region, test with real users, then scale the winners to similar markets and layer in subscriptions and in-app purchases that match local payment habits.

You are still building one product, but the revenue story only really makes sense when you look at it market by market.

2025 is not just another “big year” for apps; the numbers point to a more concentrated, high-stakes market. The global mobile app market is projected to reach roughly $257 billion by 2025, and a growing share of that is concentrated in a relatively small group of products that know exactly how they monetize. 

Hulu, for example, dominates U.S. connected TV open programmatic ad revenue across Roku, Samsung Smart TV, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV, showing how streaming and CTV inventory are now critical parts of the broader app economy, not side channels.

On mobile, gaming still drives the top-grossing charts. Average revenue per user (ARPU) in mobile gaming is projected at about $57.64 in 2025, with forecasts pushing that past $64 by 2027. A record number of apps now clear $100 million a year, and several titles have crossed $200 million in a single month, which tells you how much leverage there is once a live-ops model clicks. 

Source: Statista - Mobile Games G7

Categories like subscription-driven mental health apps are riding 15%+ annual growth toward a projected US$14.72 billion market by 2030, while dating platforms with multi-tier subscriptions and microtransactions continue to show durable recurring revenue and high retention. At the same time, mobile commerce keeps lifting conversion potential across categories as integrated payment options become the norm rather than an add-on.

Within games, the milestones are even starker. In 2025, Honor of Kings hits around $1.25 billion year-to-date, while Genshin Impact reached roughly $1.18 billion. Titles like Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival hold top-five positions on the grossing charts, and in one October snapshot alone, global mobile players spent about $6.8 billion across titles. Breakout hits like Pokémon TCG Pocket add another $237 million in Japan on their own, and match/strategy/RPG leaders quietly stack hundreds of millions more in revenue behind the headliners.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1179913/highest-grossing-mobile-games/

If you are building in this environment, the takeaway is blunt: you are not just chasing downloads; you are entering a market where hybrid models (ads + IAP + subscriptions) already generate over half of app revenues, cross-platform play can boost revenue per payer by roughly 39%, and emerging markets are delivering around 28% gains, outpacing mature regions. 

Those are the conditions you are designing your monetization against, not a clean slate.

Even if the app stores feel mature, the center of gravity is shifting fast toward emerging markets, new monetization models, and AI-driven experiences. Free-to-download apps dominate the ecosystem and now generate about 98% of total revenue through in-app advertising and purchases. Local teams matter here: developers with real context on language, payments, and culture are the ones turning that demand into products people actually keep using.

You are no longer building just for North America. India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Vietnam already account for more than a third of new App Store downloads and rapidly growing iOS revenue. By 2025, Apple’s App Store is projected to generate around $138 billion in global revenue, driven heavily by high-value users in these regions. Many teams speed up delivery by using specialized SDKs that bundle platform tools and APIs so they can ship faster instead of wiring every integration by hand.

To compete in that environment, you balance freemium, subscriptions, and hyper-personalized experiences that push ARPU up instead of relying on one blunt pricing model. All of this is happening in a mobile app market expected to grow at roughly 14–21% CAGR into the early 2030s, with revenues moving toward the trillion-dollar range.

In practice, that points to a few concrete moves:

• Design for localized pricing, languages, and cultural cues so users in emerging markets actually adopt and pay.
• Treat subscriptions as the default, then layer consumables and upsells where they truly add value.
• Use AI to tailor onboarding, offer timing, and content recommendations instead of blasting everyone with the same journey.

Prioritize health, fintech, and education use cases, where adoption in developing markets runs 2–3x higher—something we see repeatedly across AppMakers USA projects.

Look at the top-grossing charts long enough and you stop seeing random hits. You see a small set of publishers who know exactly how to run content, live ops, and economies at scale. 

ByteDance with TikTok, Tencent with its game portfolio, and Playrix in casual are three very different examples of the same thing: disciplined systems that turn attention into predictable revenue.

ByteDance and TikTok Supremacy

Plenty of social platforms fight for attention. TikTok turned it into a business. It took roughly $23 billion in 2024 revenue and used it as a springboard toward $32+ billion in ads for 2025, with about 77% of that coming from advertising alone. TikTok Shop and in-app gifts sit on top of that as extra funnels instead of the main show. Users spend around 95 minutes a day on the app, which is an absurd amount of surface area for ads and commerce.

TikTok’s value is not just eyeballs; it is the targeting and conversion behind them. Advertisers get highly tuned placements and performance data, and TikTok keeps extending reach through integrations and partnerships instead of living as a closed box. In 2023, it helped generate about $15 billion in revenue for U.S. small businesses, which is why brands treat it like infrastructure, not just a marketing channel.

The real lesson for builders is simple: TikTok built for engagement first, then stacked monetization on top in ways that do not break the feed. Short, visual, fast experiences, clear paths from content to checkout, and regional expansion plays (like TikTok Shop’s rollout in new markets) are all deliberate. You do not need that scale, but the order of operations still applies.

Tencent’s Multi-Game Empire

Tencent is not a “lucky hit” story. It is a portfolio machine. In 2025 it pulls in around $587 million in a single October from mobile titles and roughly $25.5 billion annually from games. On top of mobile, full ownership of Riot Games and a large stake in Epic Games extend its reach across PC and console, so the same company is shaping what players see on almost every platform.

In that same October snapshot, Tencent has four titles in the global top revenue growth charts, and Honor of Kings alone clears about $191.9 million in October and more than $1.1 billion year-to-date, powered by seasonal events, crossovers, and even Hello Kitty skins. Around it, games like PUBG MOBILE, League of Legends, Crossfire Legends, and newer entries such as Delta Force, TFT: Golden Spatula, Royal Kingdom, Whiteout Survival, and Kingshot keep Tencent in a big share of the global top-grossing ranks.

What holds all of this together is live-ops discipline: constant events, regional tuning, and a content cadence that keeps spenders engaged without resetting the table every year. For a smaller studio, the lesson is not “be Tencent.” 

It is to think in terms of a portfolio and operating rhythm, even if that portfolio is two titles and a live-ops calendar you actually stick to.

Playrix and Rising Challengers

In a year dominated by mega-franchises and shooters, Playrix still holds two of the world’s top 15 grossing mobile games with Gardenscapes and Township, combining for about $489 million in 2025 year-to-date revenue. At the very top of the pyramid sits Honor of Kings, with more than $18 billion lifetime revenue, showing how far a well-run live-ops title can scale.

Playrix is now defending its position against fast movers like Microfun, Paper Games, and Dream Games, while casual leaders such as Royal Match and MONOPOLY GO! keep locking in top-grossing spots with strong monetization design and ruthless live ops. 

Gardenscapes still delivers roughly $245 million but is slipping year on year, while Township climbs to about $244 million and closes the gap with newer hits like Gossip Harbor and Love and Deepspace.

Teams test events, narrative beats, and localized content like any other growth lever, not as side projects. You are not trying to copy any of these one-for-one. The useful part is understanding how they treat engagement, live ops, and monetization as one system, then borrowing the pieces that fit your product and stage.