MT: Global App Revenue Crossed $540 Billion in 2024 — Five Brands That Prove Where the Money Actually Went MD: The mobile app economy added tens of billions in a single year. These are the companies that turned app investment into measurable revenue growth, and the numbers behind how they did it.
The mobile app economy did not slow down in 2024. It got bigger. Statista put global revenue somewhere between $530 and $540 billion for the year, with projections pushing that to $585 billion in 2025. Sensor Tower’s annual State of Mobile report confirmed that in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Google Play alone hit $150 billion — a 13% jump on 2023 and the fastest growth rate since 2021.
That $150 billion figure only counts what people spend inside apps. It does not include advertising. Mobile ad spend reached $419 billion in 2025, according to Business of Apps. The combined app economy — consumer spending plus advertising — is now well past the $600 billion mark.
A few more numbers that put 2024 into context.
- Global downloads hit 218 billion, up 7% year on year.
- People spent a combined 4.2 trillion hours inside apps.
- Non-gaming apps overtook games in consumer spending for the first time in 2025 — $83.6 billion versus $83.2 billion.
- The U.S. alone accounted for $52 billion in in-app purchase revenue, over a third of the global total.
- Europe saw IAP revenue climb 24% year on year, roughly double the worldwide rate.
- AI app revenue hit $1.3 billion in 2024, with the category on track toward $156 billion by 2030.
That shift in non-gaming versus gaming matters. Five years ago, games dominated app store spending by a wide margin. Now the money is spreading into categories that were barely monetised back then — productivity, finance, health, and education.
None of this is abstract, though. Real companies built real apps and watched their revenue change because of it.
Five brands that turned app investment into revenue growth
Market-level numbers are useful, but they do not tell you much about what happens when a specific company invests in a mobile app and measures the result. These five did — and the data is public.
Starbucks — from coffee chain to mobile payments operation
Starbucks launched its app in 2009 as a store locator. By 2011, it added mobile payments. By 2014, it rolled out mobile order-and-pay before most retailers had even thought about it. Barron later wrote that Starbucks identified the smartphone revolution years before most bricks-and-mortar firms.
Where things stand now.
- The Starbucks Rewards program drives over 50% of all U.S. sales.
- Over 30 million Americans actively use the app for payments.
- App users are 5.6 times more likely to visit a physical store every day.
- Annual revenue now tops $34 billion, an 8.52% increase year on year.
- Back in 2013, the company already held $621 million in mobile platform assets.
The company also cut transaction costs significantly by processing payments through its own app instead of third-party credit card networks. Forrester Research called it “possibly the most successful mobile ordering app of all time.” It was not a marketing experiment. It was a financial infrastructure play that happened to sell coffee.
Domino’s — 85% of U.S. sales running through digital channels
Domino’s started its reinvention in 2010 when it revamped recipes, rebuilt ordering infrastructure, and went all in on mobile. The digital-first bet took a few years to show up in the numbers, but when it did, the results were hard to argue with.
- 85% of U.S. retail sales now come through digital channels (2024 data).
- Global retail sales hit $19.1 billion in 2024.
- In the UK, app orders as a share of online orders jumped from 52.2% in 2022 to 76.3% in 2024.
- Company revenue for fiscal 2024 came in at $4.706 billion, a 5.07% increase from 2023.
- Q2 2025 income from operations rose 14.8% year on year.
- India crossed 2,000 Domino’s stores by June 2024, the first country outside the U.S. to hit that mark.
The Uber Eats partnership contributed about 3% of U.S. sales, and a DoorDash partnership launched in May 2025 to push further. When Domino’s chief digital officer said in 2015 that they had “collapsed the pizza ordering experience completely,” the revenue data since then has backed that claim.
Nike — digital sales went from 10% to 26% of revenue in four years
Nike did not treat mobile as an online shop. The company built an entire ecosystem — the main Nike app, SNKRS, Nike Run Club, and Nike Training Club — and used it to sell directly to consumers instead of going through wholesale.
- Nike Direct revenue hit $21.3 billion in fiscal 2023, up 14% year on year.
- Nike Digital sales grew 24% in fiscal 2023.
- Digital went from 10% of total sales in 2019 to 26% by 2023.
- Total company revenue reached $51.4 billion in fiscal 2024.
- NikePlus members who shop through mobile apps spend 3x the amount guest shoppers spend on Nike.com.
- Nike’s annual IT/digital spend is estimated at roughly $1.3 billion per year.
Nike did pull back slightly on its DTC-only approach in 2024–2025 after digital sales softened in some quarters, rebalancing toward wholesale. But the infrastructure those apps built — the customer data, the membership base, the direct pricing control — remains the core of how the company operates.
Coca-Cola and IKEA — same pattern, different industries
Coca-Cola invested in app-based marketing and digital consumer engagement across its portfolio. By Q2 2021, the company’s revenue surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels — $10.13 billion against an expected $9.32 billion — with digital-first touchpoints playing a measurable role in the recovery.
IKEA took a completely different approach. The Place app used augmented reality to let customers photograph a room and virtually drop in IKEA furniture before buying. That turned a traditional in-store purchase decision into a mobile-first one. Walmart followed suit with similar AR integration, and now processes hundreds of millions of transactions through its mobile app monthly.
How these five compare at a glance
| Brand | App launch | Digital share of revenue | Key revenue figure | What the app changed |
| Starbucks | 2009 | 50%+ of U.S. sales | $34B+ annually | Payments, loyalty, repeat visits |
| Domino’s | 2010 (rebuild) | 85% of U.S. sales | $19.1B global retail | Ordering, delivery, operations |
| Nike | 2018 (ecosystem) | 26% of total sales | $21.3B direct revenue | DTC sales, customer data, margins |
| Coca-Cola | Ongoing | Not disclosed separately | $10.13B (Q2 2021) | Marketing, engagement, recovery |
| IKEA | 2017 (Place app) | Growing | Not disclosed | Purchase decisions moved to mobile |
The development market behind these apps
Someone has to build all of this. The development market has kept pace.
Straits Research valued the global mobile app development market at USD $269.49 billion in 2024, projecting $302.1 billion for 2025 and growth to $753.34 billion by 2033 at a 12.1% CAGR. Mordor Intelligence put the enterprise segment specifically at $168.45 billion in 2025, forecasting $303.56 billion by 2030.
Some numbers that give a sense of what the industry looks like right now.
- Over 35 million professional app developers worldwide.
- Average build cost for a mobile app: USD $40,000 to $250,000, depending on complexity.
- Around 50% of all apps are built by small or medium-sized enterprises.
- Large enterprises held 64.2% of development spending in 2024.
- AI-assisted code generation now powers over 65% of development tasks, cutting delivery times by up to 70%.
- The global developer shortfall stood at 1.4 million in 2023, projected to reach 4 million by 2025.
- Entry-level developer salaries in the U.S. rose 12% between 2022 and 2024.
That 70% reduction in delivery time from AI tooling is the number that changes the equation for most businesses. Companies that would have written off custom mobile app development services as too expensive or too slow three years ago are now looking at timelines and budgets that actually make commercial sense. The developer shortage is pushing more firms toward outsourced development and low-code platforms rather than trying to build full in-house teams from scratch.
What the revenue data tells companies that have not built an app yet
It is easy to look at Starbucks and Nike and think this only works at a billion-dollar scale. The pattern is more useful than that.
Starbucks did not build a $34 billion app overnight. It started with a store locator in 2009 and added features across years. Domino’s began with basic online ordering and iterated until 85% of sales ran through it. Nike started mobile at 10% of revenue and climbed to 26% over four years of steady investment.
The common thread is not budget size. It is treating the app as a core revenue channel rather than a marketing accessory. The companies that saw the biggest returns connected their apps directly to transactions, loyalty data, and repeat purchase behaviour — then kept improving based on what the numbers showed them.
With the global app economy past $600 billion and development costs falling because of AI tooling, the gap between companies that have invested in mobile and companies that have not is getting wider every quarter. Sensor Tower’s data showed non-gaming app revenue grew 23% in 2024 alone. That growth is not spread evenly. It is going to the businesses that built the infrastructure to capture it.
