Third-party app stores struggle to boost mobile game revenue in EU
Alternative app stores in the EU are getting downloads and funding, but not the easy revenue surge mobile game makers were promised.
A June 29 report found that third-party app stores have not yet turned Apple’s EU rule changes into the easy money many mobile game developers expected. Since 2024, iPhone and iPad users in the European Union have been able to use alternative stores, but the results have been uneven: some storefronts are growing, while others are already folding.
Setapp shut down earlier this year after running into the complexity of Apple’s EU rules, and Epic Games’ mobile store has also moved slowly. That is a rough early read for publishers hoping sideloading would quickly become a fresh revenue lane. The policy shift opened the door, but it did not automatically solve the harder problems of trust, payments, or getting players to actually try a new store.
The clearest counterexamples are smaller, narrower storefronts. AltStore has kept expanding after raising $6 million from Pace Capital, showing there is still investor appetite for alternative distribution when the pitch feels focused enough. Skich has gone further on scale, saying it has logged more than 700,000 downloads and more than 100,000 new users each month. Those are not blockbuster numbers compared with Apple’s main App Store, but they are real traction in a market where most new distribution attempts barely get out of the gate.
For mobile games, the most interesting part is not the storefront itself but what it is trying to fix. Skich’s founder framed the store around discovery, the same old pain point that keeps plaguing mobile gaming. Big app-store charts tend to reward the already dominant hits, which means fresh games can get buried before they ever find a stable audience. That is why gaming-specific distribution still looks more compelling than a generic “alternative store” pitch: it is aimed at player behavior, not just platform politics.
That leaves the EU market in a proving phase. Alternative stores are no longer just a regulatory talking point, but they are still struggling to show they can deliver more than a headline. Some are closing, some are scaling, and some are trying to win on better revenue shares and payment partnerships. For now, the post-Apple era in Europe looks less like a gold rush than a messy test of whether third-party stores can solve a real player problem.
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