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2016 App Spending

Average iPhone Users in the US Spent $40 on Apps in 2016

iStores
February 21, 2017

An interesting new report from Sensor Tower looks 2016 app spending by U.S. iPhone owners.

Games rule, yet again

Games rule, yet again
The most popular App Store categories in 2016 for U.S. iPhone users.

The most popular App Store categories in 2016 for U.S. iPhone users.

Credit: Sensor Tower

Unsurprisingly, games easily ruled the roost and accounted for 80 percent of App Store revenue in the United States. On average, iPhone users spent $27 on games, up $2 from 2015.

Music was the second most popular category accounting for $3.60 in revenue. That was followed by entertainment, social networking, and then photo and video.

Entertainment was the big winner in 2016 with revenue jumping from $1 per user in 2015 to $2.30 in 2016. That’s a jump of 130 percent.

Netflix was a signifcant driver in the category jumping in as the popular streaming service contributed more than $58 million of revenue to the category during the fourth quarter of 2016. That’s compared to $7.9 million in the same quarter in 2015.

The average U.S. iPhone user downloaded 33 apps in 2016 compared to 35 the previous year.

Data was culled from an estimate of 132 million active iPhones in the United States in 2016. Revenue estimates were from Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform.