The average app file size is now 38MB for iOS mobile apps and 15MB for Android mobile apps. In this blog post, we explore how average file sizes vary between mobile app categories. With this knowledge, you can benchmark your mobile app against others to ensure your mobile app’s file size falls within norms.
Mobile app file size is important. If your mobile app is too large, it may be difficult or expensive for users to download. A lengthy ‘time to first play’ could turn users off before they even experience your mobile app. And a user’s device may have an extremely small amount of disk space. These problems compound if the developing world is part of your target market.
Mobile games, in particular, have grown rapidly in size. The app bundles need to include game assets and various SDKs. So a large bundle size comes hand-in-hand with a rich game experience. App developers are increasingly concerned with ensuring their app bundles remain as small as possible. So they choose lightweight SDKs or download content just-in-time where possible.
Average Android and iOS file size
Of all mobile apps published on the app stores, the average Android app file size is 11.5MB. And the average iOS app file size is 34.3MB.
But these figures include mobile apps that have a release date in the distant past. Indeed, if we look at mobile apps released in the past month, we see an average Android app file size of 14.6MB. And an average of 37.9MB for iOS mobile apps.
All subsequent figures in this blog post are for the mobile apps with a release date in the past month.
Average File Size by Category (iOS)
There are significant differences in mobile app file size between categories. It is no surprise that mobile games are the largest. The average iOS mobile game is 67.7MB in size, almost 80% larger than the average across all categories.
But it is the Newsstand category that is smallest on average. Average newsstand apps come in at 18.5MB. This is no surprise since these apps have a focus on content. So they tend to be lightweight.
The following chart ranks mobile app categories in order of average file size. These are figures for iOS mobile apps only.
Average File Size by Downloads (Android)
It is also worth noting a correlation between app file size and downloads. Looking at Android mobile apps, we can see that mobile apps with a large number of downloads tend to be large in file size, too.
Of course, this is not unexpected. The most popular mobile apps tend to be feature-rich. And that means additional code and assets which will pump up file sizes. Note that the figures for more than 50 million downloads suffer from small sample sizes.
Cumulative Distribution of File Size (iOS and Android)
This chart shows the cumulative distribution of file sizes for iOS and Android mobile apps.