For the first time in 2025, consumers will spend more on non-gaming mobile apps than they do on games, according to findings from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s annual State of Mobile report. While this milestone has been seen in certain markets such as the US and in certain quarters, it is the first time it has occurred globally in 2025. Last year, consumers around the world spent about $85 billion on apps, an increase of 21% year over year. This number is nearly 2.8 times what they were spending just five years ago.
Generative AI, a defining trend over the past year, drove revenue growth, with in-app purchase revenue in this category more than tripling to more than $5 billion in 2025. Downloads of AI apps also increased, doubling year-on-year to 3.8 billion.
The growth of this segment can be attributed to several factors. For one, the popularity of AI assistants among consumers was a big driver, with the top 10 most downloaded apps all being AI assistants. The group was led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone generated $3.4 billion in in-app purchase (IAP) revenue worldwide. This figure was reported late last year.
In 2025, consumers will spend 48 billion hours on generative AI apps, which is 3.6 times the total time in 2024 and 10 times the 2023 level. Session volume, which refers to the number of times a user opens and uses an app, will exceed 1 trillion by 2025. Notably, this number is growing faster than downloads, suggesting that existing users are becoming more engaged faster than the app is adding new users.
Another factor driving revenue and adoption of AI apps is that major technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and X are investing heavily in their AI assistants to combat ChatGPT. Over the past year, they have rapidly rolled out new features and improvements in areas such as coding assistance, content generation, inference, task execution, and accuracy. The report specifically notes improvements to image and video generation, including ChatGPT’s GPT-4o image generation model released in March and Google’s Nano Banana.
Among the top AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek accounted for nearly 50% of global downloads, up from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, the leading technology publisher grew its market share from 14% to nearly 30% over the same period, overwhelming early ChatGPT competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.
The report also highlighted the role mobile plays in connecting users to generative AI services. Sensor Tower estimates that by the end of the year, AI assistants will have a total audience of more than 200 million people in the U.S., with more than half (110 million) accessing their assistants exclusively on mobile devices. For comparison, in 2024, there were only about 13 million mobile-only users.
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In addition to Assistant, there are other popular AI apps such as the AI music generation app Suno. ByteDance’s text-to-video conversion app, Jimeng AI. Also includes AI companion apps such as Character.ai and PolyBuzz.
But AI wasn’t the only driver of revenue last year, Sensor Tower found. Apps in categories such as social media, video streaming and productivity also drove growth, the report said. For example, consumers spend an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps, totaling nearly 2.5 trillion hours, an increase of 5% year over year.
