Proposed and enacted measures to prevent children under 16 from accessing prominent social networks in Australia, and a similar proposal under consideration in the U.K., have prompted questions about whether Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store could face meaningful declines in in-app purchase (IAP) revenue.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, in its 2026 State of Mobile report, documents a notable shift in mobile spending in 2025: non-game applications outpaced games in consumer spending for the first time. The report estimates that consumers worldwide spent about $85 billion on in-app purchases last year, a 20 percent increase from the prior year and nearly three times the level seen in 2020.
Within that total, social media emerged as the top-grossing genre. Sensor Tower reports social-media IAP revenue rose 13 percent to nearly $5 billion in 2025, with TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat leading the category.
Asked directly about the potential fallout from age-based access restrictions, Jonathan Brinksman, the report’s lead author, told Investing.com that Sensor Tower expects any monetization impact to be "relatively limited." He flagged two reasons for that view: under-16s constitute only a fraction of total users, and their purchasing power is typically lower than that of older age groups, which generally contribute a disproportionate share of IAP spending.
Brinksman pointed to broader monetization trends to support his assessment. He said global social-media IAP revenue climbed 16 percent in 2025 and has almost tripled since 2020. He added that growth in Australia and the U.K. ran even faster than the global average, and that these momentum factors could outweigh the direct effect of age-based restrictions on spending.
At the same time, Brinksman cautioned that platform exposure varies by demographic, which could lead to uneven revenue outcomes across social apps. He noted that TikTok and Snapchat have audiences that skew younger, while Meta’s apps attract an older user base.
Sensor Tower’s usage data, which covers users aged 18 and over, illustrates these differences in the adult population. Among users 18 and older, the 18-24 cohort accounts for roughly 44 percent of Snapchat’s audience and 42 percent of TikTok’s. By contrast, ages 18-24 make up about 30 percent of Instagram’s users and roughly 17 percent of Facebook’s users, according to the report.
Those splits suggest that a ban restricting under-16s could hit some platforms harder than others, particularly those with a larger share of younger users. Yet the firm’s view remains that, in aggregate, the reduction in addressable users would be only one factor among several shaping IAP revenue trends.
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Context and implications
For app-store operators and social platforms, the Sensor Tower analysis indicates ongoing strength in mobile monetization despite potential headwinds from age-targeted policy changes. The data show both rising aggregate spending and a shift in where that spending occurs, which complicates any simple assessment of the impact of youth access restrictions.