Adapty's 2026 in-app subscription report draws on $3B in revenue from 16,000+ apps, revealing weekly trial plans, European pricing shifts, and extreme market concentration.
Adapty this month published its State of In-App Subscriptions 2026 report, drawing on data from more than 16,000 applications that collectively processed over $3 billion in gross revenue through the platform during 2025. The report covers lifetime value (LTV), conversion rates, pricing structures, regional dynamics, and paywall patterns - and its headline finding is stark: 95% of all subscription revenue flows to the top 10% of apps.
That concentration has grown. According to the report, the equivalent figure stood at 92.7% in 2023. Meanwhile, newer apps already earn roughly 25% less at the median compared to apps launched just a few years ago. The data - processed at the app level and aggregated by segment to prevent large outliers from distorting results - covers the Apple App Store primarily, with Google Play included for store-to-store comparisons. All revenue figures are gross, denominated in US dollars.
The report is published against a backdrop of rapid market growth. Global in-app purchase revenue is projected to reach $210 billion in 2026, according to Adapty CEO Vitaly Davydov. That scale is relevant context for performance marketers: the economics of user acquisition for subscription apps depend heavily on LTV figures, and this report provides the most granular publicly available breakdown of those figures by region, category, and plan configuration seen to date.
The most commercially significant finding concerns billing cycle and trial combinations. According to the report, weekly plans paired with a free trial generate the highest 12-month LTV of any configuration. Two years ago, weekly plans accounted for 43.3% of app revenue. In the 2025 data, that share has risen to 55.5%. A weekly plan with a trial produces a 12-month LTV of $54.50, compared to $7.40 for a weekly plan without a trial - a difference of 636%. No other plan configuration comes close to that ratio.
The trial question is more nuanced than it might appear, though. The report explicitly challenges the assumption that trials always benefit developers. In Productivity apps, direct buyers generate $56.95 in LTV compared to $49.13 for users acquired through a trial - meaning trials actively reduce per-subscriber value in that category. In Lifestyle, trial users end up 21% less valuable than direct buyers. Sven Jürgens, an app growth consultant cited in the report, characterises the conventional "always offer a free trial" approach as bad advice, stating that "trials are a quality filter in some categories and a churn magnet in others."
This nuance has direct implications for cost-per-install bidding strategies. The LTV difference between a trial-converted and direct-converted subscriber in Productivity is nearly $8 - enough to materially affect the return on any paid acquisition campaign targeting that segment. Strategies for predicting LTV in mobile acquisition have been increasingly discussed as platforms like Meta and Google have pushed LTV-based bidding into mainstream campaign management.
Utilities emerge as a particularly strong category in the data. According to Adapty, a typical utility app user brings in $68.90 in the first year - the highest long-term LTV across all categories tracked. The report attributes this to retention: if an app solves a concrete problem well enough, users continue paying. The key condition is that trials must be present. Without a trial, utility app LTV drops substantially.
Category-level install LTV - which measures revenue generated per new install over 12 months, calculated by multiplying conversion rate by per-subscriber LTV - varies by roughly 2x across categories. Health & Fitness leads at $1.21 per install, followed by Productivity at $1.10 and Utilities at $1.09. Entertainment sits at the bottom at $0.59. In most categories, North American install LTV runs approximately double the global average, a geographic disparity with direct consequences for campaign targeting decisions.
Among the broader categories, Productivity leads on subscription LTV at $46.97, followed by Utilities at $46.30 and Education at $45.10.
Pricing data reveals a structural shift in European subscription economics. According to the report, European subscription prices rose 18% year over year, and Europe has now overtaken North America as the most expensive region across annual, monthly, and weekly plan types. Two years ago, European and North American prices were broadly comparable.
The sharpest change is in European Utilities annual plans, which have increased 70.5% over two years. On a per-country basis, subscription prices vary by as much as 4x. In the annual Health & Fitness category, Germany charges 4.4 times more than Turkey for equivalent access. No single country leads across all plan durations: Japan tops annual plans at $54.59, Germany leads monthly plans at $17.19, and the UK leads weekly plans at $8.72.
The pricing index constructed by Adapty places the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain all at 1.2x relative to the US baseline of 1.0. Canada sits at 0.9x, as do Brazil, Argentina, Qatar, South Korea, and the UAE. India is at 0.6x and Turkey at 0.7x - figures that matter for developers making localisation decisions.
At the country level, Switzerland generates the highest median one-year LTV globally at $28.5, followed by Qatar at $27.5 and Israel at $27.0. Switzerland, Iceland, and the UK all exceed the United States ($19.9) and Canada ($20.9) on this measure. Top Latin American countries produce LTV roughly 35% lower than their European counterparts, pointing to the need for distinct regional monetisation strategies. Concentration dynamics in the app subscription market have been building for several years, with separate research from RevenueCat published in March 2026 showing the top quarter of apps growing monthly recurring revenue 80% year over year while the bottom quarter contracted by 33%.
The 95% revenue concentration figure deserves attention beyond its headline impact. Among new apps with at least some revenue, 57.7% bring in between $1 and $1,000 per year. The report does not include zero-earners in this calculation, meaning actual app mortality and underperformance rates are likely higher than the figure implies.
According to Adapty's data, high-price apps generate approximately 3 times the LTV of low-price apps. This creates a compounding challenge for new entrants: they face pressure to keep prices low to attract early users, but low prices structurally compress LTV, reducing the maximum sustainable cost-per-install in paid acquisition campaigns. The economics of mobile app user acquisition have been shifting, with AppLovin reporting net revenue per installation growth of 70% in its second quarter 2025 results - reflecting how tightly revenue-per-install and bidding dynamics are interconnected across the ecosystem.
The annual plan structure also reveals a consistent cross-market pattern. A median annual plan costs approximately 3 times the price of a monthly plan globally. That pricing structure implies annual subscribers save around 75% compared to paying month by month - a discount that functions as a conversion lever but also compresses short-term cash flow for developers who rely on monthly billing to smooth revenue.
The report breaks down conversion and LTV not only by billing cycle and trial status, but also by paywall type. Adapty's broader dataset includes interactive data on how paywall configuration affects outcomes. The general finding - consistent with separate data published by RevenueCat - is that paywall design has measurable and category-specific effects on conversion rates.
Apple itself expanded its App Analytics capabilities in June 2025, introducing more than 100 new metrics at WWDC25 including download-to-paid conversion and average proceeds per download. These additions moved Apple's developer measurement tooling closer to the variables that Adapty's benchmark report now quantifies across 16,000 apps. The timing is notable: as paywall and pricing optimisation data becomes more granular, the gap between developers who act on that data and those who operate on intuition widens.
The Adapty report covers eight major App Store categories: Health & Fitness, Education, Lifestyle, Photo & Video, Productivity, Utilities, Entertainment, and Graphics & Design. Regional segmentation spans the US, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Data is processed at the app level before aggregation, and apps with insufficient transaction volumes are excluded - a methodology designed to ensure benchmarks reflect products with genuine market traction rather than early-stage noise.
The report's relevance for the performance marketing community extends beyond subscription app developers themselves. LTV data feeds directly into the bidding models that govern Google App Campaigns and equivalent systems on other platforms. When those models are calibrated using inaccurate LTV assumptions - for instance, treating a trial-converted Productivity user as equivalent to a direct-converted one - the resulting bids systematically overpay or underpay for installs.
The report's geographic breakdown sharpens this further. A developer running a single global campaign without regional LTV differentiation will likely overbid for installs in Latin America (where LTV runs 35% below European levels) and potentially underbid for installs in Switzerland, Qatar, or Israel, where per-user value exceeds both US and Canadian benchmarks. Apple's services division reached record levels in 2025, with the App Store averaging 850 million weekly users globally - a distribution infrastructure whose value is partly a function of the LTV economics this report documents.
The concentration finding also matters for user acquisition strategy in a broader sense. If 95% of revenue accrues to 10% of apps, and if newer apps already earn 25% less at the median, the implied bar for reaching viable unit economics through paid acquisition has risen. The Adapty dataset does not include cost data, so it cannot directly calculate return on ad spend. But the LTV figures it provides are a necessary input for that calculation, and the report's interactive format - which allows filtering by region, category, and plan duration - is designed precisely for this kind of benchmarking exercise.
The report covers 500 million transactions across the 16,000-plus apps connected to Adapty's platform, which the company describes as a complete subscription growth platform. Adapty reports a historical service level agreement of 99.99%.
Who: Adapty, a subscription growth platform with more than 16,000 connected apps and over 500 million transactions processed, released the report. CEO Vitaly Davydov authored the foreword. The data covers developers across the US, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
What: The State of In-App Subscriptions 2026 report provides benchmark data on LTV, conversion rates, pricing, and paywall patterns across eight major App Store categories. Key findings include: 95% of subscription revenue flows to the top 10% of apps (up from 92.7% in 2023); weekly plans with trials generate 636% more 12-month LTV than weekly plans without trials ($54.50 vs $7.40); European subscription prices rose 18% year over year, overtaking North America as the most expensive region; and 57.7% of new apps with revenue earn between $1 and $1,000 per year.
When: The report covers data from 2025 and was published on March 14, 2026.
Where: Data comes primarily from the Apple App Store, with Google Play included for store comparisons. The interactive report is published at adapty.io and covers five global regions with country-level LTV and pricing breakdowns.
Why: The report addresses the gap between guesswork-based pricing decisions and data-driven monetisation by providing developers with category- and region-specific benchmarks. For the performance marketing community, the LTV figures directly affect acceptable cost-per-install thresholds in paid acquisition campaigns, and the regional breakdown highlights meaningful differences in user value that single-market or global-average assumptions obscure.