The app revenue numbers companies revealed in court

App-revenue estimates are usually just that — estimates. But once in a while the industry is forced to show receipts. The Epic Games v. Google antitrust trial put hundreds of internal documents on the public record: Google's own revenue analyses, publishers' board decks, negotiation emails with real dollar figures. We read the full exhibit set and pulled every usable revenue and download number. Each figure below carries its exhibit number, so you can verify it at the source.

1. Fortnite generated over $300M across all platforms in May 2018 alone — ~$318M/month at peak — per Google's internal "Project Elektra" analysis (PX-1485, PX-917).
2. Fortnite reached $1.2B in cumulative revenue roughly one year after launch (PX-805, independently confirmed in PX-1485).
3. Fortnite earned ~$100M on iOS in its first 90 days (PX-917); by June 2018 iOS contributed ~$40M of a $300M+ month (PX-805).
4. King's Google Play business alone ran at ~$197M/year in August 2019; portfolio-wide, Activision Blizzard King discussed a $1B annual run-rate in Play gross sales (PX-360, PX-148).
5. Tinder was doing ~$83M/year on Google Play in 2019 — before Match Group publicly fought the 30% fee (PX-360).
6. Bumble's own board decks show the Bumble app growing $127M → $142.5M → $153M in quarterly revenue through 2021, with Badoo flat at ~$58M/quarter (PX-1351–1353).
7. By August 2020, Facebook had 506M, Instagram 294M, Netflix 194M and Spotify 115M cumulative Google Play installs (PX-939).

Fortnite: the numbers Google calculated in private

In 2018 Fortnite skipped the Play Store, and Google's corp-dev team quietly built an investment case around it — codenamed Project Elektra (PX-1485). Their internal math: Fortnite was earning about $318M per month at peak (May 2018), had banked $1.2B cumulative since launch, and its 125M-player base made it the single largest hole in Play's catalog. A separate deck (PX-805) put June 2018 revenue at over $300M, of which ~$40M came from iOS. These are not analyst estimates; they are the figures Google used when deciding whether to write Epic a check.

The 17-publisher Google Play revenue table

Exhibit PX-360 (August 2019) is the kind of table market-intelligence vendors charge five figures for: Google's own annualized-revenue view of its top publishers, drawn up while negotiating retention deals. Play-side only, run-rate basis:

Two things stand out. First, the ceiling: even the biggest mobile publishers ran at $100–230M/year per store — useful calibration next to headlines that casually attribute billions to single apps. Second, the shape: this is a long-tail market even at the very top — the #1 publisher out-earns #17 by only ~4×.

Bumble's board-deck quarterlies

Bumble Inc.'s internal board presentations (PX-1351–1353) surfaced GAAP-grade segment numbers rarely visible outside an S-1: the Bumble app grew from $127M (Q2 2021) to $142.5M (Q3) to $153M (Q4) in quarterly worldwide user revenue — $533M for the year — while Badoo stayed flat at ~$58M/quarter. The same decks show Bumble at ~15M MAU vs Badoo's ~26M: the smaller-audience app out-earned the bigger one nearly 3×. Monetization quality beats raw reach, in the company's own numbers. Both apps are tracked live on Appdex: Bumble's current estimate · Tinder's.

Cumulative installs: the August 2020 snapshot

An internal Google dataset (PX-939) recorded lifetime Play installs as of August 2020: Facebook 506M · Instagram 294M · Netflix 194M · Spotify 115M. Beyond trivia, these are rare fixed points for calibrating install-base models — public, dated, and from the platform's own books.

How we use numbers like these (and how you should)

Court exhibits are gold precisely because nobody wrote them for marketing. But they age: every figure on this page describes 2016–2021, several are run-rates or projections rather than booked revenue, and scopes mix Play-only with cross-platform. We keep them in our verified historical layer — as calibration culture and sanity anchors, never as inputs pretending to be current. For live figures, every app page on Appdex shows today's estimate with an honest confidence label instead. If you cite this page, cite the exhibit numbers too — that is what makes these numbers different from everyone else's.