Asia Pacific dominates list of top 50 mobile app publishers in 2022

Photo credit: Sea Group

Asia-Pacific companies dominated Data.ai‘s list of the top 50 publishers based on revenue, taking up 27 slots.

Tencent was the leader for the sixth year in a row, while ByteDance climbed five spots to second place thanks to TikTok. The short-video app generated US$3.3 billion in consumer spend in 2022, according to the report.

Other publishers from the region that performed well in 2022 included NetEase, Baidu, and Bandai Namco.

The only firm hailing from Southeast Asia is Sea Limited, which houses Garena – the game developer behind Free Fire – and ecommerce major Shopee, at the 27th spot. This placed the Singapore tech conglomerate ahead of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Konami.

The list does not consider revenue earned from in-app advertising, commerce, or payments outside the Android and iOS app stores.

According to Sea’s most recent earnings report, Garena’s quarterly active users declined to 491.6 million in Q1 2023 from 615.9 million in the same year-ago quarter. However, average booking per paying user stayed relatively level at US$12.3 compared to US$13.1 in the previous year.

However, while Sea has stopped disclosing quarter-on-quarter gross merchandise value (GMV) for Shopee since Q1 2023, the online shopping platform saw US$18 billion in GMV in Q4 2022. This is about the same as the US$18.2 billion it logged the year prior.

See also: Sea Group’s financial health in 8 charts

In 2022, consumers spent five hours per day on mobile devices, with 70% of that time spent solely on entertainment apps, the Data.ai report noted. Short-form video apps, especially TikTok, were the most popular among consumers.

Most of the top publishers in 2022 also used a mix of one-time purchases and recurring subscriptions to monetize their apps. Out of the top 50 publishers, 42 relied on in-app purchases more than subscriptions.