Top mobile games 2026: who leads on downloads, revenue and DAU

Let’s start with something that doesn’t quite add up.

Mobile game downloads fell 12% in the first half of 2026. 24 billion, down from roughly 27. Meanwhile in-app purchase revenue? Down 2%.

So the market lost an eighth of its new players and barely lost any money.

Work through what that means and it gets more interesting. Every download arriving in 2026 is worth roughly 11% more than the one that arrived a year earlier. Fewer people showing up, each of them carrying more.

That’s not a soft patch. That’s the growth lever moving, and the rest of this piece is about where it moved to.

The clearest place to watch it happen is the leaderboards, which barely overlap. The most downloaded game of the last 19 months sits 3,264th by in-app purchase revenue. The highest grossing one sits 47th by installs. Both are doing well. They’re being paid by different people.

This piece ranks the top mobile games by downloads, revenue and daily active users using Sensor Tower unified data covering 1 January 2025 to 31 July 2026, worldwide, iOS and Android combined. Growth compares that window against the equally long period before it, 4 June 2023 to 31 December 2024.

Top mobile games by downloads

Rank	Game	Publisher	Downloads	Growth vs prior period
1	Block Blast!	Hungry Studio	526.0M	+75.4%
2	Roblox	Roblox	506.4M	+32.4%
3	Garena Free Fire	Garena	487.1M	+5.8%
4	Subway Surfers	Miniclip (SYBO)	334.6M	-7.1%
5	Pizza Ready!	Supercent	274.6M	+24.7%
6	Ludo King	Gametion	260.1M	-9.0%
7	Vita Mahjong	Learnings	219.1M	+367.3%
8	EA SPORTS FC Mobile Soccer	Electronic Arts	198.5M	+20.2%
9	Hole.io	Voodoo	195.5M	+88.0%
10	My Talking Tom 2: Pet Game	Outfit7	181.6M	-8.4%

Sensor Tower unified data, 1 Jan 2025 to 31 Jul 2026, worldwide. Drawn from the top 10,000 apps by download volume.

Three of the top ten went backwards against the prior period, which is worth noticing on a chart most people read as a growth list.

The bigger finding is how little this table represents. These ten games account for 4.7% of all installs in the dataset. The top 500 account for 43.9%. Downloads don’t concentrate the way revenue does, they spread, and most of that long tail earns from advertising rather than in-app purchases. A market view built on installs alone is looking at roughly half the picture and treating it as the whole one.

One caution on any download chart, this one included. In Sensor Tower’s July 2026 recap, Roblox was the most downloaded game of the month with Block Blast! third. A 19-month leader can already have been overtaken, so cumulative and monthly charts are worth reading as two different questions rather than one answer.

Top-grossing mobile games

Rank	Game	Publisher	IAP revenue	Growth	Download rank
1	Last War: Survival	FUNFLY (FirstFun)	$2.44B	+97.7%	47
2	Honor of Kings	Tencent	$2.30B	+12.5%	92
3	Whiteout Survival	Century Games	$2.24B	+76.6%	54
4	Royal Match	Dream Games	$2.17B	-4.6%	41
5	MONOPOLY GO!	Scopely	$2.08B	-24.7%	203
6	Candy Crush Saga	King	$1.75B	-3.7%	18
7	Coin Master	Moon Active	$1.46B	+0.8%	297
8	Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story	Microfun	$1.32B	+468.0%	56
9	Peacekeeper Elite (Game for Peace)	Tencent	$1.18B	+24.0%	497
10	Roblox	Roblox	$1.13B	-44.3%	2

Sensor Tower unified data, same period. Gross in-app purchase revenue, before store commission, excluding advertising.

Reorder the same dataset by revenue and nine of the ten names change. Only Roblox appears on both lists, and it sits second on one and tenth on the other.

Last War leads the 19-month total without leading today. Honor of Kings was back at number one in Sensor Tower’s July ranking and finished H1 2026 on top at close to $1.1 billion, with the monthly position moving between the two across the year. The detail underneath the ranking matters more. Sensor Tower’s H1 index notes that Last War switched off user acquisition during the half and still finished near the top of the revenue chart. A game can now hold that position while buying nothing, which is about as direct a signal as this market gives about where the lever has moved.

Revenue also concentrates in the exact opposite direction to downloads. These ten games took 23.2% of all in-app purchase revenue in the set, the top 50 took 51.0% and the top 100 took 64.5%. At the same time, 6,541 of the 9,544 games earned under $100,000 each across 19 months, and between them they carry 49.6% of all downloads.

Half the installs in mobile gaming go to games that are effectively invisible on this chart, because their income arrives as ad revenue rather than in-app purchases. Any market model built only on store revenue is missing the economics of half the market.

The gap between the two charts

Game	Download rank	Revenue rank	IAP revenue per download
Block Blast!	1	3,264	$0.00
Subway Surfers	4	739	$0.03
Roblox	2	10	$2.22
Whiteout Survival	54	3	$20.83
Honor of Kings	92	2	$27.77
MONOPOLY GO!	203	5	$42.98
Peacekeeper Elite	497	9	$45.27

Sensor Tower unified data, same period. Revenue per download is gross IAP only.

Block Blast! is first on downloads and 3,264th on in-app purchase revenue, at roughly $65,000 over 19 months. Those two facts describe a game doing very well. Hungry Studio built it to earn from advertising, so the install base is the asset and the in-app purchase line was never meant to carry weight.

Peacekeeper Elite runs the other way, at 497th by downloads and 9th by revenue, earning $45.27 of in-app purchase revenue for every install. Both models work. They need different scoreboards.

This is where benchmarking quietly goes wrong. An ad-monetized title is judged on install cost and impressions per user. An in-app purchase title is judged on ROAS and LTV across a small share of payers. Hold one to the other’s benchmarks and the conclusion inverts. A CPI that reads as a crisis for one is a good day for the other, and blended ARPDAU hides which situation you’re in unless ad revenue and in-app purchase revenue land in the same reporting layer.

Top mobile games by daily active users

Rank	Game	Publisher	DAU	Growth
1	Roblox	Roblox	145.4M	+55.3%
2	Garena Free Fire	Garena	88.8M	+9.7%
3	Mobile Legends: Bang Bang	Moonton	54.4M	+7.2%
4	Brawl Stars	Supercell	49.1M	+0.4%
5	Block Blast!	Hungry Studio	47.0M	+255.7%
6	Clash Royale	Supercell	35.3M	+58.3%
7	Candy Crush Saga	King	26.7M	-24.2%
8	Subway Surfers	Miniclip (SYBO)	24.2M	-14.2%
9	Royal Match	Dream Games	21.0M	+1.3%
10	EA SPORTS FC Mobile Soccer	Electronic Arts	20.8M	-3.4%

Sensor Tower unified DAU estimates, same period, worldwide.

A third leaderboard, and a third set of names. Only three of the top ten highest grossing games appear here at all: Roblox, Candy Crush Saga and Royal Match. Reach and revenue turn out to be separate assets, and the two titles that come closest to holding both, Roblox at revenue rank 10 and Garena Free Fire at rank 12, are platforms built on user-generated content and social loops rather than on a fixed content pipeline. When players make the content, engagement stops depending on how fast the studio can ship.

Clash Royale is the line worth sitting with. DAU up 58.3% and revenue up 98.6%, ten years after launch. Nothing about that came from an acquisition push, which makes it one of the strongest arguments on this page for treating retention as a growth channel with its own budget rather than as a metric the UA team reports on.

The publishers behind the charts

Publisher	IAP revenue	Titles in set	Downloads
Tencent	$7.60B	33	575M
Century Games	$3.78B	13	336M
Dream Games	$2.75B	2	256M
Playrix	$2.71B	7	286M
FUNFLY	$2.44B	1	112M
Scopely	$2.38B	10	174M
Supercell	$2.25B	7	301M
King	$2.21B	9	231M
Microfun	$1.82B	7	135M
NetEase	$1.74B	24	224M

Sensor Tower unified data, same period. Android figures cover Google Play only and China is iOS only, so publishers with large Chinese Android businesses are understated here.

Rank publishers by downloads instead and almost none of these names survive. Azur Interactive Games leads with 1.56 billion installs across 131 titles, followed by Onesoft at 1.44 billion across 133, Voodoo at 1.20 billion across 91, Miniclip at 1.19 billion across 47 and SayGames at 1.05 billion across 103. XGame Global, Supercent, Outfit7, ironSource and Learnings fill out the rest.

Put the two lists side by side and the contrast is stark. Dream Games earns $2.75B from two titles. Azur Interactive Games moves 1.56 billion installs across 131 titles and books $83.1M of in-app purchase revenue, with most of its economics sitting in ad revenue this dataset doesn’t measure.

Neither model is better. They face different constraints, and the constraint is what should decide the tooling. A two-title studio can hand-manage campaign structure down to the ad set and win on depth. A publisher carrying 131 titles has no version of that available, so it competes on how fast creative gets produced, tested and retired instead. That’s the point where creative analytics at portfolio scale and automated cost aggregation across dozens of networks go from useful to load-bearing.

Publisher headquarters adds one more layer. China-headquartered publishers account for $25.64B of gross in-app purchase revenue here, roughly a third of the total, and that’s before Chinese third-party Android stores which aren’t tracked. Ireland books $2.77B from 30 titles and Finland $2.83B from 41, largely Playrix and Supercell. Vietnam and Pakistan carry 955 and 753 titles between them and sit low on in-app purchase revenue, which reflects an advertising business model rather than underperformance.

Top mobile games by country

Market	Share of global game spend, July 2026	January 2026
United States	29.5%	31%
China (iOS only)	16.7%	16%
Japan	12.3%	13%

Sensor Tower monthly gaming recaps, January 2026 and July 2026. App Store and Google Play only.

Global consumer spending on mobile games reached $6.6 billion in July 2026, up 7.7% month over month, on 3.72 billion downloads, up 2.2%. India led downloads with 609 million, 16.4% of the global total, ahead of the United States at 7.8% and Brazil at 6.3%.

Those two paragraphs contain most of what a regional plan needs. The United States is close to 30% of the money and under 8% of the installs. India is 16% of the installs and doesn’t appear in the revenue top three at all. Same worldwide chart, two completely different businesses underneath it.

United States

The US spend-to-install ratio runs close to four to one, and it changes what a good campaign looks like there. American users cost more to acquire and return more once acquired, so a global CPI ceiling applied to US campaigns will trip long before the cohort has had a chance to pay back. Payback window is the more honest measure for that market, and teams that switch to it usually find US spend was being cut early rather than being spent badly.

US share has drifted slightly too, from 31% of global spending in January to 29.5% in July. That’s a small move rather than a break in the trend, though it’s the kind of thing that shows up in a quarterly plan well before it shows up in a headline.

China

China contributed 16.7% of global game spending in July 2026, and that covers iOS alone. Chinese third-party Android stores carry a large share of domestic distribution and aren’t tracked here, so anyone sizing that market from store estimates should read the number as a floor rather than a total.

Tencent titles anchor it. Honor of Kings led global revenue in July on a seasonal update and themed character skins domestically, plus an Inuyasha crossover and an esports tournament internationally. Game for Peace ranked fourth by worldwide revenue growth off its Summer Adventure update. Both appear in the revenue table above, as Honor of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite.

Japan

Japan was the third largest market at 12.3% of global spending in July 2026, and Japanese-published titles show the low-install, high-revenue pattern more sharply than anywhere else. SD Gundam G Generation Eternal booked $307.8M on 6.2M downloads from a zero base. Fate/Grand Order booked $414.4M on 1.4M downloads.

hololive Dreams launched on 23 July 2026 and entered the global top ten by revenue growth within days. Install volumes that would read as a failed soft launch elsewhere move revenue charts in Japan, which is a good argument for setting targets by market rather than applying one global benchmark and drawing the wrong conclusion twice.

South Korea

Korea shows up through launches rather than steady share. Netmarble’s SOL: enchant launched on 18 June 2026 and ranked second worldwide by revenue growth that month, then kept climbing in July. When one domestic launch can reshape a global growth chart, launch calendars matter more than they do elsewhere, and so does knowing when to hold budget back.

Europe

No single European market reaches the top three by revenue share in any month of 2026, which says more about fragmentation than about size. The clearest European signal this year was the World Cup. Sensor Tower’s H1 index picks out football titles and Cup-themed live ops as among the few mobile areas still growing through a half when downloads contracted broadly. EA SPORTS FC Mobile Soccer sits at rank 8 by downloads and rank 10 by DAU here, and four football titles appeared in July’s global download top ten. Calendar events still move this market when the content lines up behind them.

India and Brazil

India alone was 16.4% of global game downloads in July 2026, more than double the United States. Ludo King, from India’s Gametion, sits at rank 6 worldwide with 260.1M downloads. Brazil follows at 6.3% of installs.

These markets run largely on ad monetization, so they reward a different model rather than a smaller version of the same one. Apply in-app-purchase-first LTV assumptions and campaigns that are working perfectly well will read as unprofitable, usually right before someone switches them off.

Key insights for performance marketers

1. Downloads fell 12% and revenue didn’t follow. That gap defines 2026.

Sensor Tower’s H1 2026 gaming index puts mobile in-app purchase revenue at $39.8B against $40.6B a year earlier, on 24 billion downloads, down 12%. Playtime held at 221 billion hours. Gaming digital ad spend rose 8% to $7B across 41 markets and 18 channels, on 1.4 trillion impressions, up 14%.

Read together, those numbers describe a market where the players are still there and still spending, but fewer of them are arriving through the install funnel and more budget is going into advertising to reach the ones who do. Reporting that still leads with install volume is leading with the number that fell. Revenue per cohort and payback period are the ones that held, and putting them at the top of the dashboard is a marketing analytics decision before it is a media buying one.

2. The download leader and the revenue leader are running different businesses

Block Blast! at rank 1 and 3,264 respectively is the clearest case, but the pattern runs through the whole dataset. Before comparing any two titles, check whether they earn from advertisers or from payers, because the benchmark set changes completely. Our gaming benchmarks are split by vertical for that reason, and a ROAS figure that mixes ad revenue and in-app purchase revenue without separating them will produce a number nobody can act on.

3. Half the market earns almost nothing from in-app purchases

6,541 of the 9,544 games here earned under $100,000 each across 19 months, and they carry 49.6% of total downloads between them. That is not a fringe. It is half the install volume in mobile gaming, monetizing through a channel that store revenue data doesn’t report. Without ad monetization analytics feeding the same reporting layer as everything else, those titles have no visible unit economics at all, and the teams running them are optimizing on instinct.

4. Live ops is producing bigger revenue swings than acquisition

Clash Royale nearly doubled revenue a decade after launch. Gossip Harbor grew in-app purchase revenue 468.0% to $1.32B. Pokémon TCG Pocket grew 209.0% to $867.3M. Last War held near the top of the revenue chart with acquisition switched off. None of those was a launch moment or a spending decision.

The same pattern shows up in how publishers grow portfolios. Century Games launched Kingshot into $1.10B from a zero base while Whiteout Survival, its existing title in a neighbouring genre, grew 76.6% at the same time. Dream Games took Royal Kingdom to $580.1M while Royal Match held $2.17B. Running two close titles in parallel without one drawing from the other is a segmentation problem before it is a creative one, which is where audience management and suppression lists earn their place.

5. Store data stops seeing revenue the moment a game sells anywhere else

Roblox is the sharpest example in the dataset: downloads up 32.4%, DAU up 55.3%, mobile in-app purchase revenue down 44.3%. It sells a virtual currency that players buy across web, console and mobile, so store data captures a shrinking slice of real spend by design. Any setup that reads store revenue as total revenue will misprice a title like that, and the same applies to a growing number of games running direct-to-consumer webshops. This is the working case for D2C revenue tracking in mobile games and for web attribution and cross-device attribution running alongside the app side.

MONOPOLY GO! is the counterpart worth understanding rather than flagging. Downloads down 64.0% while revenue fell 24.7%, which is the shape most mature titles eventually take. The payer base is holding while acquisition tapers, and that is frequently a deliberate stage rather than a warning sign.

6. One global CPI target will misprice the US and India in opposite directions

The US is close to 30% of the spend and under 8% of the installs. India is 16% of the installs and outside the revenue top three. A single global acquisition-cost ceiling applied across both will cut US campaigns before payback and overpay in volume markets at the same time. Market-level targets, set against how each market actually monetizes, fix both errors at once.

7. At 130 titles, creative throughput is the only thing left to compete on

Azur Interactive Games carries 131 titles in this dataset and Onesoft 133. Nobody hand-tunes campaign structure at that scale, and nobody needs to. What decides the outcome is how quickly creative is produced, tested and retired across the portfolio, which puts creative analytics and unified mobile attribution on the critical path rather than in the reporting stack. Cohorted revenue by source, deduplicated across channels and devices, is a marketing ETL problem before it is a creative one.

Where the money moved by genre

By segment, hybridcasual was the clearest revenue growth story in H1 2026, up around 23% to $2.4B, while mid-core fell roughly 7% to about $20.6B and casual held near $16.5B. By genre, strategy remains the largest at $9.3B, puzzle reached $8.1B after close to 20% growth, RPG came in at $6.1B and casino at $5B.

Puzzle gaining that much while RPG gave up ground is a large enough shift inside a single half to change where a portfolio publisher points its next greenlight, and where a UA team should expect competitive CPMs to rise. It also explains part of what the decline table would show. Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact both moved down on revenue and downloads across the window, in line with where RPG revenue sat overall.

Set against Sensor Tower’s full-year 2025 picture, where consumer spending on in-app purchases reached $167 billion on 10.6% growth while games contributed $82B on 1.3% growth, the direction holds. Games are no longer carrying the growth of the app economy. Non-game in-app purchase revenue grew 21% in 2025 and passed games for the first time, and generative AI apps alone doubled downloads to 3.8 billion. Every one of those apps is competing for the same attention and the same ad inventory.

Where this leaves 2026

The three leaderboards on this page share almost no names, and that is the finding rather than a quirk of the data. Downloads, revenue and engagement have separated far enough that a game can lead one and sit outside the top 500 on another while running a healthy business.

What the titles that grew this year have in common is not spending. Clash Royale, Gossip Harbor and Kingshot took three different routes, and none of them came from buying more installs than everyone else. They came from knowing precisely who was already there and what those players were worth.

That is a measurement capability before it is a creative or media one, and it is the part of the stack most likely to be the constraint in a year when the install funnel is shrinking.

Now run this on your own titles

Every chart on this page is someone else’s data. The version that changes decisions is yours: which campaigns produced the payers, what a cohort is worth by day 30, and how ad revenue and in-app purchase revenue combine into one ROAS number you can bid against. Singular brings cost, ad revenue, in-app purchase revenue and cross-device installs into a single dataset, so the gap between the two charts above becomes something you measure rather than something you infer.

See the analytics platform top game studios use, or read why teams are moving their MMP to Singular.

Looking at other platforms? See our breakdowns of the top PC games right now and the top apps of 2026.

FAQs

What is the most downloaded mobile game in 2026?

Block Blast! from Hungry Studio, with 526.0 million downloads between 1 January 2025 and 31 July 2026, ahead of Roblox at 506.4 million and Garena Free Fire at 487.1 million. On a current-month basis the order shifts: Roblox was the most downloaded mobile game worldwide in July 2026, with Free Fire second and Block Blast! third. Source: Sensor Tower.

What is the highest-grossing mobile game?

Honor of Kings from Tencent. It topped Sensor Tower’s H1 2026 revenue ranking at close to $1.1 billion and was back at number one in July 2026. Across the longer window from 1 January 2025 to 31 July 2026, Last War: Survival leads on cumulative in-app purchase revenue at $2.44 billion, ahead of Honor of Kings at $2.30 billion and Whiteout Survival at $2.24 billion. All figures are gross in-app purchase revenue and exclude advertising.

Why is the most downloaded game not the highest grossing?

Because they earn money from different sources. Block Blast! ranks 3,264th by in-app purchase revenue because it monetizes through advertising, so its income sits in a column app store data doesn’t report. Titles like Honor of Kings and MONOPOLY GO! earn $27 to $43 of in-app purchase revenue per download from a much smaller install base. Both are working models, and they need different benchmarks.

Which mobile game has the most daily active users?

Roblox, at approximately 145.4 million daily active users across iOS and Android in the period, followed by Garena Free Fire at 88.8 million and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang at 54.4 million.

Is the mobile games market growing in 2026?

Not on volume. Mobile game downloads fell 12% year over year in H1 2026 while in-app purchase revenue fell only 2% to $39.8 billion, which means revenue per download rose roughly 11%. Playtime held steady at 221 billion hours and gaming digital ad spend rose 8% to $7 billion. Growth in the wider app economy is coming from non-game apps, which grew in-app purchase revenue 21% in 2025.

Which country spends the most on mobile games?

The United States, at 29.5% of global mobile game consumer spending in July 2026, followed by China at 16.7% on iOS alone and Japan at 12.3%. India leads on downloads rather than spending, at 16.4% of global installs in the same month.

Which country produces the highest-grossing mobile games?

China-headquartered publishers, at $25.64 billion of gross in-app purchase revenue across 980 titles in the dataset, followed by the United States at $11.12 billion and Japan at $6.52 billion. The China figure is a floor rather than a total, because Chinese third-party Android stores are not tracked.

What genre makes the most money on mobile?

Strategy remains the largest genre at $9.3 billion in H1 2026, followed by puzzle at $8.1 billion after close to 20% growth, RPG at $6.1 billion and casino at $5 billion. Source: Sensor Tower H1 2026 Gaming Digital Market Index.

How is mobile game revenue measured across platforms?

App store in-app purchase data captures store transactions only. Games with web shops, direct-to-consumer payment flows or cross-platform currencies book revenue that never appears in store figures, and ad-monetized games earn outside it almost entirely. Measuring total revenue means attributing across devices and payment surfaces rather than reading app store receipts.

Sources

• Sensor Tower unified app data, 1 January 2025 to 31 July 2026, worldwide, top 10,000 apps by download volume
• Sensor Tower H1 2026 Gaming Digital Market Index (full report)
• Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2026 (full report)
• Sensor Tower Top 10 Worldwide Mobile Games: January 2026, June 2026, July 2026
• PocketGamer.biz reporting on Sensor Tower’s H1 2026 index