App Mergers and Acquisitions (2026)

Since the emergence of the App Store in the late 2000s, there have been millions of apps published on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The most successful of these have generated billions of dollars in revenue every year, minting the creators and drawing in potential buyers.

Mergers and acquisitions have played a key part in turning fast-growing apps into valuable digital businesses, with multi-billion dollar takeovers and acqui-hires concentrating innovation, scale and revenue. At the same time, founders and developers are able to cash out of one idea and spin up another, growing the app economy.

Many of the app economy’s biggest winners have used M&A effectively to plug holes, add more users, adopt emerging technologies and stave off competitors. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram could be seen as the greatest example of this, purchasing it for $1 billion in 2012 and turning it into a platform that delivers more than 45% of Meta’s $164 billion revenue.

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What we have seen over the last five years is a shift from the largest tech giants using their purchasing power for M&A, to smaller operators and private equity firms purchasing popular brands and building portfolios of app brands. Bending Spoons, Prosus and Francisco Partners are three of the best examples of this new wave of app buyers.

That is partly due to increased oversight by trade commissions in the United States, Europe and China, which are keen to target major acquisitions by tech giants. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been getting around this by acqu-hiring, alongside large scale investment in startups which gets them board seats and exclusivity agreements.

In this database of app M&A complied by EHVM Capital founder Evelin Herrera, we can see that $225 billion has been spent on apps since 2008. Read on below to find out more.

App Mergers and Acquisitions Key Statistics

• The largest app acquisition was Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022
• Out of the tech giants, Microsoft is head of the pack in M&A with $28.9 billion spent
• Bending Spoons has made 12 app acquisitions, the most of any company
• The average deal size was $1.72 billion
• The most popular app categories for acquisition are health & fitness and social networking

App Mergers and Acquisitions

This is a collection of over 100 app mergers and acquisitions, currently totalling $225 billion in M&A spend.

App mergers and acquisitions 2008 to 2025 ($mm)

Source: Evelin Herrera at EHVM Capital