In an unprecedented shift, 2025 saw consumers allocate more funds to mobile applications that are not games than to gaming apps for the very first time. This significant development was revealed in the annual "State of Mobile" report published by the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. While this trend had been evident in specific regions like the United States or during particular quarters in previous years, it wasn't until 2025 that this phenomenon unfolded on a global scale. Across the world, spending on mobile apps reached an astounding $85 billion last year, marking a remarkable 21% increase from the previous year. To put this into perspective, this amount was nearly 2.8 times higher than what consumers spent just five years prior.
A pivotal force behind this surge in revenue is the rise of generative AI, which has emerged as a defining trend over the past year. In 2025, revenue from in-app purchases within the AI category skyrocketed, surpassing $5 billion as it tripled in growth. The number of downloads for AI applications also experienced impressive growth, doubling year-over-year to reach an impressive 3.8 billion.
Several factors contributed to this robust growth within the AI application segment. A key driver was the widespread adoption of AI assistants among consumers, with all of the top ten most downloaded apps being AI assistants. Leading the pack were OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. Notably, ChatGPT alone accounted for a staggering $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue—a figure we highlighted in a report late last year.
Consumers engaged with generative AI apps for a total of 48 billion hours in 2025, which is 3.6 times more than the time spent in 2024 and ten times the usage recorded in 2023. The volume of sessions—indicating how many times users opened and interacted with an app—exceeded one trillion in 2025. Remarkably, this figure grew at a faster rate than downloads, suggesting that existing users were becoming more committed and engaged than the influx of new users experiencing the apps for the first time.
Another important element fostering the revenue and adoption of AI applications is the substantial investment made by major tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and X, all striving to compete with ChatGPT. Throughout the past year, these companies have rapidly introduced new features and enhancements aimed at advancing their AI assistants' capabilities in various areas including coding assistance, content creation, reasoning, and task execution. The report pointed out notable advancements in image and video generation technologies, such as ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model for image generation released in March, alongside Google's innovative Nano Banana.
Among the leading developers in the AI field, OpenAI and DeepSeek now account for nearly 50% of total global downloads, a significant increase from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, established tech companies expanded their market share from 14% to almost 30% during the same period, effectively edging out earlier competitors of ChatGPT like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.
The report further emphasized the critical role that mobile devices play in facilitating user access to generative AI services. By the end of the year, Sensor Tower estimated that the total audience for AI assistants in the U.S. surpassed 200 million, with over half of these users (about 110 million) exclusively accessing services via mobile devices. In comparison, only around 13 million users were identified as mobile-only in 2024.
In addition to AI assistants, other popular AI applications included Suno, an AI music generation tool; ByteDance’s Jimeng AI, a text-to-video application; and companion apps like Character.ai and PolyBuzz.
However, it's essential to note that AI wasn’t the sole contributor to revenue growth last year. The Sensor Tower report identified other categories such as social media, video streaming, and productivity apps as also playing significant roles. For example, users spent an average of 90 minutes each day on social media apps, accumulating nearly 2.5 trillion hours collectively, reflecting a 5% increase year-over-year.
