Consumers spent more on mobile apps than games in 2025, driven by AI app adoption

In 2025, global consumer spending on non-game mobile applications surpassed spending on mobile games for the first time, according to findings from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower in its annual State of Mobile report. While this shift had previously occurred in select regions, such as the U.S., or during individual quarters, 2025 marked the first year the trend played out worldwide. Globally, users spent an estimated $85 billion on mobile apps last year, a 21% increase from the prior year. That total was also nearly 2.8 times higher than app spending recorded five years earlier.

A major driver of this surge was generative AI, which emerged as one of the year's most influential technology trends. Revenue from in-app purchases within generative AI apps more than tripled in 2025, surpassing $5 billion. At the same time, downloads of AI-powered apps doubled year over year, reaching 3.8 billion worldwide.

Several factors contributed to the segment's rapid growth. Chief among them was the rising popularity of AI assistants among everyday users. All of the top 10 apps globally by download volume were AI assistants, led by OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone generated $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue, a figure reported toward the end of last year.

User engagement with generative AI apps also climbed sharply. In 2025, consumers collectively spent 48 billion hours using these apps — 3.6 times the total recorded in 2024 and roughly 10 times the usage seen in 2023. Session volume, which tracks how often users open and actively use apps, exceeded one trillion sessions over the year. Notably, session growth outpaced download growth, indicating that existing users were engaging more deeply even as new user acquisition slowed.

Another contributor to AI app adoption and monetisation was sustained investment from major technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and X, which expanded their AI assistant offerings to compete with ChatGPT. Throughout the year, these companies released new features at a rapid pace, strengthening capabilities in areas such as coding support, content creation, reasoning, task automation, and accuracy. The report specifically highlighted advances in image and video generation, including ChatGPT's GPT-4o image generation model introduced in March and Google's Nano Banana.

Among leading AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek together accounted for nearly half of all global AI app downloads in 2025, up from 21% the year before. During the same period, large technology publishers increased their share of the AI app market from 14% to nearly 30%, squeezing out earlier ChatGPT competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

The report also emphasised the central role mobile devices play in connecting users to generative AI tools. Sensor Tower estimates that by the end of the year, the total U.S. audience for AI assistants exceeded 200 million users, with more than half — around 110 million people — accessing these services exclusively via mobile devices. By comparison, in 2024, only about 13 million users were considered mobile-only.

Beyond AI assistants, other AI-driven apps also gained traction in 2025. Popular examples included the AI music creation app Suno, ByteDance's text-to-video platform Jimeng AI, and AI companion apps such as Character.ai and PolyBuzz.

While AI played a significant role in driving app revenue last year, it was not the only contributing factor, the report noted. Spending growth was also supported by apps in categories such as social networking, video streaming, and productivity. For example, users spent an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps in 2025, totalling nearly 2.5 trillion total hours—an increase of 5% compared with the previous year.