This Week in Apps - But Is It Real?
This Week in Apps is a short, no-fluff, round-up of interesting things that happened in the mobile industry. Here are our top highlights.
U.S. Revenue Index (vs. 30 days ago)
Insights
1. If You Build It (for TikTok), They Will Come
Ever heard of Starla? I didn't either until a few days ago, when the app jumped to the top of the App Store. Downloads surged, revenue followed, and for a brief moment, Starla was everywhere!
How? Starla went viral on TikTok!
Can Starla's virality lead to ongoing stickiness?
If you're not familiar, Starla is an astrology app that uses AI to map the sky and answer questions. It can also draw your soulmate. Weird, I know, and it didn't work for me, but it's a great sharable gimmick that TikTok loved.
Viral, yes, but will it get sticky with a $14.99/mo. price tag?
It did for a bit. Appfigures Intelligence shows Starla gained 2.2M users who spent $2.5M of revenue (before store fees) in the app since the beginning of June, when Starla's rise began.
The US App Store drove the majority of downloads and almost all of the revenue, which isn't surprising for an AI app that took off through TikTok.
But Starla's viral success is not looking very sticky. Downloads and revenue peaked mid-June with more than 100K downloads and about 112K in net revenue in a single day, but dropped considerably since to a little over 20K downloads and the same in revenue at the end of last week.
Grossing more than $2M in a single month is nothing short of amazing, and a great reminder that the App Store is a great opportunity. But, virality doesn't mean stickiness, so if you're taking the time to push for virality it's also important to plan your retention.
2. Adobe Brought its Generative AI to Mobile - Can it Compete?
Adobe's finally joined the mobile party. After showing off its generative AI chops on desktop, Adobe just launched Firefly as a standalone app on iOS and Android.
Firefly aims to capture social media posters, a market that doesn't have that much mobile competition. Current solutions include talking to ChatGPT or one of the other big LLMs, using Midjourney via Discord, or using something like Canva, which is a slightly different solution.
The move makes sense - AI is hot, Midjourney is still stuck inside Discord, and Adobe is a household brand name. But... can Adobe compete?
Let's have a look at the numbers.
Since launching roughly a month ago, Firefly saw a little more than 240K new downloads from the App Store and Google Play. A smidge more from the App Store.
Most downloads are coming from the US, Firefly's biggest market with 45% of the downloads so far, followed by Germany, India, and Japan. Though together, those don't add up to the US.
Firefly also monetizes right in app, though it works with existing Adobe Cloud subscriptions so I expected that number to be low, and it is. According to our estimates, Firefly earned $12K of net (after fees) revenue from the App Store and Google Play so far, where the majority came from the App Store.
Like most new app launches, Adobe is using Apple Ads to push the app with a focused campaign and no Custom Product Pages, probably testing the waters. While there aren't many direct competitors, the AI market at large is heavily saturated.
Having used Firefly when it first launched on the web and considering Adobe's access to stock photography and art that they own, I expect Firefly to become an easy go-to for many. If... Adobe can price it correctly.
Right nowm a subscription goes for $4.99/mo. or $49.99/yr. which sounds reasonable, but we need a few more weeks of data before we can tell if that's low enough to get mass adoption.
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3. Is Voice AI (Finally) Becoming Popular?
AI-generated voices are getting better fast—and now they're mobile. ElevenLabs, one of the biggest names in AI text-to-speech, just launched its first mobile app. What's interesting isn't just the tech (which is solid), but how empty the space around it is.
For a feature so many creators and tools rely on, there really aren't many mobile-first options. Unlike other AI apps, voice isn't very popular. Will ElevnLabs change that?
For those not familiar, ElevenLabs makes text-to-speech AI models that are hyper realistic and are used to power many apps, including Perplexity's audio summaries and ESPN's AI agents.
With the release of its mobile app, ElevenLabs is now offering their models to regular consumers who need to replace text with voice. I see it as primarily targeting social media, but there are quite a few applications.
Elsewhere, AI audio isn't really getting a lot of love. The niche ElevenLabs entered isn't very competitive, with the only other app I could find that's similar being Speechify, an app that reads the news for you. Not a true competitor. To compound that, OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode in gpt4o hasn't gotten (m)any updates in quite a while.
But the real question is: are people excited for hyper-realistic text-to-speech?
According to Appfigures Intelligence, ElevenLabs saw 350K downloads from the App Store and Google Play. A little more than half from the App Store and the rest from Google Play, which is a good spread for a launch.
But here's something interesting. The US isn't ElevenLabs' biggest market. The crown goes to India, with 22% of the downloads, followed by the US with 18% of the total. That's not exactly what I expected, but it does show the enormous potential TTS has to enable cross-language communication.
I checked to see if ElevenLabs is running Apple Ads campaigns, and it is, but not well. The company seems to be running aimless discovery campaigns without Custom Product Pages (which we can now see). I hope they find a better strategy soon.
Is There a Market for Voice?
The lack of competition makes it hard to gauge just how much of a market there is for voice, but looking at the one similar app - speechify, a news reader - answers my question relatively quickly with a yes.
The app, which was released in 2017, saw 670K new downloads in May and earned $2.5M of net revenue (after store fees) from the App Store and Google Play. That's a decent opportunity, and while not in direct competition, there's nothing stopping ElevenLabs to get into that market too.
When OpenAI got into voice, I thought it'd take off and we'd see voice in more apps, but that hasn't evolved as fast as I expected. I don't think this app will be the nudge voice needs, but I think it could become popular if ElevenLabs can find a way to get to the mass market.
4. Hello Google (Gemini)! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in June
Can you believe it's already July? Well, with June behind us it was time to crunch the numbers and rank the most downloaded apps in the world.
Yes, it was ChatGPT, again.
ChatGPT was the most downloaded app in the world for the second month, ending June with 50M downloads from the App Store and Google Play. It's worth noting that ChatGPT was the most downloaded app on the App Store and Google Play in June, not just overall.
ChatGPT has become the Google of AI in the minds of most, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon.
TikTok and Instagram continued their years-long tussle. This time TikTok was the winner, beating Instagram's 36M downloads with 37M downloads, according to our estimates. Not a big difference, and mainly the result of Instagram getting slightly fewer downloads on Google Play.
Facebook and WhatsApp round out the top five most downloaded apps in June with 30M and 28M new downloads.
While the list itself looks like a carbon copy of May's, the numbers are lower for every single app except for one - ChatGPT.
According to our App Intelligence, the top 10 most downloaded apps made their way into 290M devices in June, a drop of roughly 8% when compared to May's total. Summer isn't great for some apps...
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5. HBO Is Back! The Highest-Earning Apps in the World in June
I crunched the numbers and analyzed the highest-earning mobile apps in the world in June, and for the first time in quite some time, all apps across both stores are identical to May, but with different numbers (and icons).
Let's start at the top: TikTok was the highest-earning app in the world in June. It was the highest-earner across both stores and combined, and with a generous lead preventing any other app from catching up quickly with a mega $384M haul, according to our estimates. And that's net, which means what Bytedance gets to keep and share with creators after Apple and Google take their fees.
This is the highest amount of revenue TikTok has earned in a single month!
ChatGPT, which is racing to become the top earner, grew a little slower than expected in June to $185M in net revenue, according to our App Intelligence. ChatGPT is in a unique position where it's getting closer to becoming a household name, but isn't exactly there quite yet. That said, its growth has been impressive and I can see it closing in on TikTok and even taking the lead by 2026.
YouTube, Tinder, and Disney+, round out the top five highest earners in June, but all three earned less in June than they did in July, with Disney+ taking the biggest hit, dropping $9M to $112M, according to our estimates.
Streaming apps are facing a big problem.
Right below, in #6, is HBO Max - the latest rebrand from just Max. HBO Max, just like YouTube and Disney+, took a bit of a hit in revenue in June, likely due to the prevalence of short drama apps. The top three short dramas cleared a little over $100M in June, and that revenue has to come from somewhere...
When looking at the total revenue for all four, it's very clear where that revenue is coming from.
Our estimates show that HBO's share of the pie dropped from 54% in January of this year to 46% in June while gross revenue for the group rose 7% to $286M. I've been watching the rise of short dramas for over a year now and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Short drama apps are here to stay and big streamers, like HBO Max, will need to fight them at some point, possibly by releasing their own versions.
Back to the list! Together, the top 10 highest-earning apps brought in $1.4B in June, a bit more than May but the difference got rounded away. And like May, the trend I've been talking about for over a year now continues - downloads are down but revenue is up. Make sure you're doing as much as you can with your downloads.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
