[HHaan]

There are 181,000 apps with subscriptions out there, not millions

That number (as the “in general RevenueCat apps overperform” statement) are based on the data from app performance tracking companies like data.ai, Apptopia, Appfigures, etc - it’s these companies jobs to index apps and their performance. How those work and how that compares to where our data comes from is worth a whole seperate post

I work at RevenueCat (shared that info before, by the way, + this is the same handle I use in most other places)

[HHaan]

Probably worth writing about how this data compares to “the whole” at some point, but I’m going to decompress from working on these 263 pages for a bit, first

[lapcat]

> There are 181,000 apps with subscriptions out there, not millions

You said "That makes up a sizeable share of all apps", not "That makes up a sizeable share of all subscription apps". Whereas I said, "there are literally millions of mobile apps", not "there are literally millions of subscription apps". So you've offered two red herrings in a row.

My original point was that RevenueCat's report covers only subscription apps—a fact that I think nobody is disputing—and thus it's kind of bizarre to suggest, as the article title does, that a report exclusively about subscription apps explains "why devs beg for subscriptions", especially since the report itself says that the majority of those subscription apps are not doing particularly well.

To be clear, I was not arguing with RevenueCat's report; rather, I was arguing with the article's spin.

[HHaan]

Oh, the whole 'begging for subscriptions' line was definitely a bit much

Not to argue the point to death, but subscriptions make up the majority of in-app purchase revenue. If you exclude games, 96% of iap revenue was subscriptions in '23. We saw a definite trend of folks mixing in consumables / one-time purchases, so that revenue split probably shifted quite a bit for 24

The 'elephant in the room' is probably that 2/3 of mobile revenue is made through ads, though a lot of those ads are apps advertising in other apps. Unsure if it's technically a ponzi scheme, but it's close

Thing to also note is that over 2/3 of all mobile iap revenue is made by 200 apps. It's a super top-heavy industry to be in

[lapcat]

> It's a super top-heavy industry to be in

Yes, and this disparity exists even within the subscription subset of apps.