In-app purchases: types and key statistics

Whether you’re a user wondering what “Offers In-App Purchases” actually means in the App Store, or a developer planning your app’s monetization strategy, in-app purchases are at the center of how mobile apps make money today. In-app purchase (IAP) revenue across iOS and Google Play passed $39 billion in Q4 2024 alone, and the model now generates the majority of non-advertising mobile app earnings.

This guide explains what in-app purchases are, the four IAP types defined by Apple and Google, how they work technically, what they cost in 2026, and how to implement them — plus what you need to know if you’re a parent or user who just wants to understand or restrict them.

What is an in-app purchase?

An in-app purchase (IAP) is something a user buys inside a mobile app — extra content, premium features, virtual currency, an ad-free experience, or a subscription. Apple calls these “in-app purchases”; Google Play uses the term “in-app products.” Both stores require digital goods sold inside an app to go through their official billing system, with rare exceptions for physical goods, real-world services, and a small number of regulated app categories.

Most modern apps are free to download. According to recent platform data, the overwhelming majority of apps on both the App Store and Google Play are free at the install step, which makes IAPs the primary lever for monetization once a user is acquired. Whether you sell virtual coins in a mobile game, unlock pro features in a productivity app, or charge a recurring subscription for premium content, you’re using in-app purchases.

Quick reference: the four types of in-app purchases

Before diving into each type in detail, here’s a side-by-side comparison of how the four IAP types work, what they’re typically used for, and what users can expect:

The four types of in-app purchases explained

Consumable in-app purchases

Consumables are products that get used up and need to be purchased again. The classic example is in-game currency: a player buys 1,000 coins, spends them on power-ups or skins, and once they’re gone, has to buy more. Consumables also cover credits in non-game apps — for instance, a photo editing app might sell a pack of premium export credits, or a dating app might sell a bundle of profile boosts.

Because consumables generate repeat revenue from the same user, they tend to be priced lower than other IAP types. They’re a strong fit for apps where engagement creates ongoing demand for the product itself, especially mobile games.

Non-consumable in-app purchases

Non-consumables are paid once and unlocked permanently. Common examples include removing ads, unlocking a pro tier of features, buying a specific level pack in a game, or accessing a paid content bundle (like a meditation library or a workout program). Because the user pays once and keeps the benefit forever, non-consumables typically cost more than equivalent consumables, and platforms require apps to support restoring non-consumables across the user’s devices.

Auto-renewable subscriptions

Auto-renewable subscriptions charge the user on a recurring basis — weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually — until they cancel. The user gets continuous access to the app’s premium tier, ad-free version, or a specific feature set as long as their subscription is active.

This is the dominant monetization model for modern non-game apps and an increasingly large share of game revenue too. Streaming services, language apps, fitness apps, news apps, productivity tools, and most paid utility apps rely on auto-renewing subscriptions because they produce predictable, recurring revenue and align with the value delivered (continuous access to evolving content or services).

Subscriptions can be combined with free trials, intro offers, and tiered pricing. Apple and Google handle billing, dunning (failed payment retries), and subscription state management, but developers still need to track subscription state in their backend and handle entitlement logic.

Non-renewing subscriptions

Non-renewing subscriptions give the user a fixed period of access — for example, a 3-month season pass to a sports app, a one-semester course access, or a magazine subscription that explicitly doesn’t renew. When the term ends, access stops and the user has to manually buy a new subscription if they want to continue.

This type is much less common than auto-renewing subscriptions because it doesn’t compound. It’s mostly used in categories where the content has a natural fixed duration (sports seasons, academic terms, time-bound events).

How in-app purchases work: the technical flow

From the user’s perspective, an in-app purchase is a single tap. Behind the scenes, several systems coordinate to verify identity, charge the correct account, deliver the content, and reconcile billing. Here’s the typical flow:

1. The user taps a buy button inside the app (e.g., “Unlock Pro,” “Buy 500 coins”).
2. The app calls into the platform’s billing SDK — StoreKit on iOS, Google Play Billing Library on Android — which displays a native confirmation prompt.
3. The user confirms with Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint, or a password, and the platform charges their Apple Account or Google Account on file.
4. The platform issues a receipt or purchase token to the app.
5. The app validates that receipt — ideally on its own server, not just on-device — to confirm the purchase is real and not tampered with.
6. Once validated, the app grants the entitlement: unlocking the feature, crediting the consumable, or activating the subscription.
7. Apple or Google takes their commission and pays out the rest to the developer on their standard schedule (typically monthly).

Subscriptions add several extra states to track: free trial, intro offer, in grace period (a failed renewal that’s being retried), in billing retry period, paused, expired, refunded, and revoked. Apple’s App Store Server API and Google’s Real-time Developer Notifications send server-to-server signals when these states change so your backend stays in sync.

Examples of in-app purchases by industry

The right IAP mix depends heavily on the app category. Here are typical patterns we see across the major monetizing verticals, drawn from Adapty’s State of In-App Subscriptions 2026 report covering 16,000+ apps and roughly $3 billion in tracked revenue:

Gaming is still the largest single IAP category by revenue, but subscription-based non-game apps have been the fastest-growing segment for years and continue to drive most of the new revenue we track in our subscription benchmarks.

In-app purchase fees: the full 2026 breakdown

Both Apple and Google take a commission on every digital in-app purchase made through their billing systems. Physical goods and real-world services (a ride, a meal delivery, retail merchandise) are exempt and use external payment methods like cards, Apple Pay, or third-party processors directly.

Apple App Store fees in 2026

Apple’s standard commission is 30% of the purchase price for in-app purchases. Two big exceptions apply:

• The App Store Small Business Program reduces the commission to 15% for developers earning less than $1 million per year. Most independent developers fall under this tier.
• For auto-renewable subscriptions, Apple charges 30% during the first year of continuous billing, then drops to 15% for every renewal after that.

Several regulatory developments have changed the picture in the last 18 months:

• EU Digital Markets Act (DMA): In the European Union, developers can use alternative app stores and alternative payment systems on iOS. Developers who opt into the new business terms pay reduced commissions but may also owe a Core Technology Fee of €0.50 per first annual install above one million.
• Epic v. Apple ruling: Following the April 2025 court ruling in the United States, iOS apps can include external links to web purchases without paying Apple a commission on those flows. Apple updated App Store guidelines in response.
• Korea, Netherlands, India: In these markets, Apple permits alternative billing for certain app categories with a roughly 4-percentage-point commission reduction compared to the standard rate.
• Reader apps and music streaming: Reader apps (apps that primarily deliver previously purchased content like books, audio, video) can include a single external account-management link without using StoreKit billing.

Google Play Store fees in 2026

Google Play’s commission structure mirrors Apple’s broad shape but with a few differences:

• The first $1 million in earnings every year is automatically charged at 15% for every developer, regardless of company size.
• Earnings above $1 million per year are charged at 30%.
• Auto-renewable subscriptions are charged at 15% as a flat rate from day one (no first-year 30% surcharge).
• Physical goods, real-world services, and certain regulated categories are exempt and use other payment systems.

Google also runs alternative billing programs in select markets (including the EU, India, South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and others), where qualifying developers can offer a non-Google billing system alongside Google Play Billing in exchange for a roughly 4-percentage-point commission reduction.

Summary: Apple vs Google fees at a glance

iOS vs Android: how IAP behavior differs

Android dominates global device share — well over two-thirds of all smartphones in use run Android — but iOS users spend significantly more per user on in-app purchases. There are several reasons for the gap.

Apple devices skew toward higher-income consumers in mature markets like the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, where willingness to pay is higher. Apple also has strong presence in markets where Google Play has limited reach, including mainland China. App Store users tend to convert at higher rates and pay higher prices, while Google Play wins on volume — and on emerging markets where price sensitivity is higher and ad-based models often outperform IAP.

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, introduced in 2021, made third-party attribution and targeting on iOS much harder. Many developers responded by leaning more heavily into IAP and subscription revenue rather than ad revenue, where targeting is more constrained. Android still allows broader attribution signals, but Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative is shifting Android in a similar direction.

For developers, this means IAP strategy should usually be platform-aware. iOS often warrants higher price points, more aggressive trial-to-paid funnels, and more investment in lifetime-value optimization. Android benefits from broader price laddering, more localized pricing, and stronger emphasis on conversion optimization at the top of the funnel.

Pros and cons of in-app purchases

Benefits of in-app purchases

• Low-friction monetization. Users try the app for free, get to value, and pay only when they’re ready. This converts dramatically better than charging upfront.
• Recurring revenue potential. Subscriptions in particular generate predictable monthly revenue that compounds, supporting valuation and reinvestment.
• Built-in payments infrastructure. Apple and Google handle billing, fraud screening, dunning, refunds, and tax in 175+ countries. Developers trade commission for global payment coverage they would otherwise spend years building.
• Data feedback loop. Purchase patterns reveal what features and pricing users actually value, which informs product, pricing, and marketing decisions.
• Higher engagement. Paying users typically retain better and engage more deeply, because they’ve made a commitment to the product.

Challenges of in-app purchases

• Platform commissions. 15–30% is significantly higher than direct payment processing on the web. For high-volume apps it adds up to millions per year.
• Low conversion rates. Industry-wide, only a small percentage of free users convert to paying users. Monetization strategies need to focus either on volume or on high-value repeat purchases from the buying minority.
• Platform dependency. Both Apple and Google can change their rules, fees, and policies. Recent regulatory pressure has loosened control somewhat, but developers still operate at the platform’s discretion.
• Implementation complexity. Building a robust IAP system with receipt validation, subscription state management, and analytics requires significant engineering investment, which is why infrastructure providers exist.
• Refund and chargeback risk. Users can request refunds long after purchase, and refunds reverse the entitlement plus the developer revenue. High refund rates can also impact App Store standing.

How to identify in-app purchases in the App Store and Google Play

Both stores are required to disclose when an app contains in-app purchases. Knowing where to look is useful both for users who want to avoid surprise charges and for developers who want to understand what users see before they download.

On the App Store (iOS)

If an iPhone or iPad app contains in-app purchases, you’ll see “Offers In-App Purchases” displayed near the Get button (for free apps) or near the price tag (for paid apps) on the app’s listing. On the app’s detail page, scroll down to the “Information” section and tap “In-App Purchases” to see the full list of products available, including their prices.

On Google Play (Android)

Google Play apps with in-app products show a small “In-app purchases” label beneath the app’s title, developer name, and content rating. Google Play doesn’t always list every individual product, but you can usually see a price range under the “About this app” section.

It’s worth noting that “Offers In-App Purchases” doesn’t mean the app will charge you automatically — it means the app contains purchasable items you can choose to buy. The app itself may still be free to download and use without ever paying anything.

How to manage or disable in-app purchases

If you’re a parent, a manager handing out shared devices, or simply want to prevent accidental purchases, both platforms let you restrict in-app purchases at the device level.

Disabling in-app purchases on iPhone or iPad

1. Open Settings and tap Screen Time.
2. Tap Content & Privacy Restrictions and enable the toggle.
3. Tap iTunes & App Store Purchases.
4. Tap In-app Purchases and set it to “Don’t Allow.”

Apple also offers an “Ask to Buy” feature through Family Sharing. With Ask to Buy enabled, any purchase a child requests is sent to the family organizer for approval before it goes through.

Disabling or restricting in-app purchases on Android

1. Open the Google Play Store app.
2. Tap your profile icon and open Settings.
3. Tap Authentication and then “Require authentication for purchases.”
4. Choose “For all purchases through Google Play on this device.”

Google Family Link also lets parents approve every download and purchase request from a managed child account, similar to Ask to Buy on iOS.

In-app purchase fraud and how to protect against it

Wherever there’s transaction volume, there’s fraud. IAP fraud takes several forms, and each requires a different defense.

• Receipt forgery and replay attacks. Attackers generate fake receipts or reuse legitimate ones to claim entitlements they didn’t pay for. The defense is server-side receipt validation against Apple’s App Store Server API or Google Play Developer API, with a deduplication layer that rejects reused receipts.
• Jailbroken or rooted devices. Tampered devices can install apps that bypass the platform billing flow entirely or modify the local entitlement state. The defense is to never trust on-device entitlement state alone — always verify against your backend.
• Stolen card and account fraud. Fraudsters use stolen Apple Account or Google Account credentials to make purchases. Apple and Google handle a lot of the upstream screening, but you’ll see chargebacks and refunds downstream that you need to reconcile.
• Subscription event fraud. In categories with high payouts per acquisition (especially social casino, gaming, and lead-gen apps), fraudsters fake subscription events to claim user-acquisition payouts. Server-to-server postbacks and event-level validation help separate real subscribers from manufactured ones.
• Refund abuse. Some users systematically buy, consume the content, then request refunds. Tracking refund rates by user, cohort, and acquisition channel surfaces the worst offenders. Apple’s Refund Saver-style flows and Google’s refund APIs let you respond more aggressively.

The general rule for fraud prevention: keep entitlement logic on your server, validate receipts server-to-server, listen for real-time platform notifications, and instrument analytics that flag anomalies in conversion, refund, and chargeback rates.

Engagement metrics that drive IAP revenue

Whether you can grow IAP revenue depends almost entirely on how engaged your users are. The metrics that matter:

• DAU and MAU. Daily and monthly active users. The DAU/MAU ratio (sometimes called stickiness) shows how often your active users come back within a month.
• ARPDAU. Average revenue per daily active user. Tracks how each engaged session translates into revenue and reacts visibly to product, pricing, and campaign changes.
• ARPPU. Average revenue per paying user. Isolates spend behavior from conversion rate, which is essential when you’re optimizing pricing or upsell flows.
• Conversion rate (free → paying). The percentage of users who make any in-app purchase. A small lift in this number compounds into significant revenue at scale.
• Trial-to-paid conversion. For subscription apps, this is the make-or-break metric. Benchmarks vary by category, geo, and price point — see Adapty’s State of In-App Subscriptions 2026 for current numbers.
• Churn and retention. For subscriptions, monthly churn determines long-term LTV and the math of profitable user acquisition.
• Refund rate. Both a financial metric and a quality signal. Spikes often correlate with paywall design issues, misleading copy, or accidental purchases.

Most teams underinvest in tying these metrics to specific product and paywall experiments. A dedicated app funnel analysis reveals where in the journey users drop off and where pricing or paywall changes will have the largest impact.

Why subscriptions dominate in-app purchase revenue

Across the apps Adapty tracks, auto-renewable subscriptions account for the majority of recurring IAP revenue and continue to grow faster than other monetization types. There are a few structural reasons.

Subscriptions align price with continuous value delivery, which fits how modern non-game apps actually work — ongoing content updates, evolving feature sets, AI capabilities that improve over time, cloud-backed personalization. Users get a low entry point, often through a free trial or intro offer, and the developer earns predictable revenue that scales.

Subscriptions are also the only IAP type that compounds. Every active subscriber from last month is still revenue this month unless they cancel — meaning growth, retention, and pricing all stack into long-term revenue rather than resetting after each purchase. That compounding is why subscription apps tend to command higher valuations than equivalent one-time-purchase or ad-monetized apps.

The cost of running subscriptions is also higher: managing trial states, intro pricing, dunning, win-back offers, regional pricing, and cross-platform sync requires real infrastructure. That’s why most modern subscription apps either build a dedicated team for it or use a subscription infrastructure provider.

How to price your in-app purchases

Pricing IAPs is part science, part experimentation. A few principles consistently move the needle:

• Anchor with multiple price points. A single SKU forces a yes-or-no decision. Three options (e.g., monthly, annual with discount, lifetime) let users self-select and almost always lift overall conversion and ARPU.
• Localize aggressively. Apple and Google support country-specific pricing, and using local price tiers — not just currency conversions — typically lifts conversion in price-sensitive markets.
• Use intro offers strategically. A free trial, intro price, or “first week for $0.99” can dramatically lift initial conversion, but each adds complexity to your trial-to-paid funnel.
• A/B test paywalls, not just prices. Copy, design, button placement, value props, and offer order often matter more than the absolute price number.

For a deeper treatment, see our guide on how to price mobile in-app subscriptions and our post on mobile app paywall A/B testing.

Implementing in-app purchases on iOS and Android

Building a production-grade IAP system means handling several distinct concerns: configuring products in App Store Connect and the Google Play Console, integrating the platform billing SDKs, implementing receipt validation, managing subscription state, handling refunds and renewals, building paywalls, supporting cross-platform restoration, and instrumenting analytics for paywall performance.

If you want to go DIY, we have detailed step-by-step tutorials for every major mobile stack:

• iOS in-app purchase tutorial — Swift, StoreKit, App Store Connect setup
• Android in-app purchase tutorial — Google Play Billing Library, Play Console configuration
• React Native in-app purchases tutorial — cross-platform implementation patterns
• Flutter in-app purchases tutorial — Dart-side integration with both stores
• Expo in-app purchases tutorial — managed and bare workflow walkthroughs
• Can you use Stripe for in-app purchases? — when web-based payment flows are allowed and how to use them

Plan for several weeks of engineering work to get a basic system live, plus ongoing maintenance to handle platform policy changes, edge cases, and analytics.

The faster way: build IAPs with Adapty

Adapty is an in-app purchase and subscription infrastructure platform that gives you everything you’d otherwise build yourself — receipt validation, subscription state management, paywall builder, A/B testing, analytics, refund handling, and integrations with attribution and analytics tools — through a single SDK.

With Adapty, you can:

• Add IAPs and subscriptions to iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Expo, Unity, KMP, and Capacitor apps in hours, not weeks.
• Build, edit, and A/B test paywalls without code via remote config.
• Track conversion, churn, LTV, and revenue at the cohort and segment level.
• Handle refunds proactively with our refund saver flow.
• Sync subscription state across web and mobile for hybrid web-to-app businesses.

If you’re starting from scratch or hitting the limits of a homegrown setup, getting started with Adapty is free and takes minutes.

Wrapping up

In-app purchases are the dominant way mobile apps make money in 2026, and the model is only getting richer as platforms loosen rules under regulatory pressure and as new payment paths open up. Whether you’re picking the right IAP types for your app, designing your pricing, building the implementation, or just trying to understand a charge on your statement, the four-type framework — consumables, non-consumables, auto-renewable subscriptions, and non-renewing subscriptions — is the foundation everything else builds on.

If you’re a developer, the build-versus-buy decision for IAP infrastructure is one of the highest-leverage calls you’ll make. Building it yourself takes months of focused engineering and ongoing maintenance as platform policies evolve. Adapty gives you the same infrastructure that powers thousands of apps generating billions in subscription revenue, with a free tier to get started.