Freemium Games on iOS, by Category

This is a brief follow-up to my previous post, in which I showed that freemium games in the Android ecosystem, despite doing well overall, haven't (yet) dominated all game categories. Racing, sports and puzzle games all feature a healthy number of paid games in their top-grossing lists, while the action, casino and "casual" categories are thoroughly dominated by freemium games.

I performed the same calculations for the iOS App Store. Categories are much more fluid in the App Store, there are more of them and games can (and do) show up in multiple categories. On top of that, users have to hunt around a little more to see games broken down by category, making the distinction between categories much less important.

Nonetheless, a comparison between iOS and Android might still be worthwhile. I wanted the to have the closest thing to an apples-to-apples comparison between iOS and Android that I could. To do so, I had to combine some iOS game categories to make them better correspond to Android game categories. The Action and Arcade categories were averaged together, as were the Card and Casino categories to come up with the following charts.  Note that there is no "Casual" category for iOS games, so it is omitted.

These figures are similar to what we saw on Android. The only major difference is in the Action and Arcade categories, where paid apps do much better on iOS. I'm at a loss to explain why, but feel free to leave a comment if you have an idea.