71% of top-charting Android apps carry ads — and games are far worse

Google Play labels every listing with two facts most people scroll past: whether the app is ad-supported, and whether it contains in-app purchases. We pulled those flags for all 4,800 titles in our index — the top 200 of each of our 24 categories — and the picture is fairly stark.

The headline numbers

• 71% carry advertising
• 70% contain in-app purchases
• 53% have both
• 11% have neither

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. Across 4,800 of the most-installed apps and games on the platform, only 544 are free to download and free once you are inside.

Games are the outlier

Splitting by type shows where the pressure comes from:

• Games with ads: 85%
• Apps with ads: 58%

A 27-point gap. Free-to-play economics have essentially standardised on advertising in games, while utilities and productivity apps still have room for a paid tier or a subscription that removes the pitch.

Why the “free” label is doing a lot of work

Every app in this sample is free to install. That word covers three quite different deals: genuinely free, free-with-ads, and free-until-you-hit-a-paywall. The store does not rank them differently, and the download button looks identical in all three cases.

We list the flags on every app page for that reason, and maintain a list of the 544 titles with neither for anyone who wants to skip the guessing.

Method

Figures are taken from the adSupported and offersIAP fields Google Play exposes on each listing, collected on 7 September 2026. The sample is the top 200 free titles in each of our 24 categories, deduplicated by package name. It describes the top of the charts, not the store as a whole — the long tail almost certainly looks different.