A significant shift occurred in 2025, as global consumer spending on non-game mobile applications surpassed spending on mobile games for the first time. This milestone, previously observed only in specific markets like the United States or during isolated quarters, was confirmed in the annual "State of Mobile" report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Worldwide, approximately $85 billion was spent on apps last year, marking a substantial 21% increase from the previous year. This figure is nearly 2.8 times higher than the total spent just five years earlier.

Generative AI emerged as the primary engine for this revenue growth. In-app purchase revenue within this category more than tripled in 2025, exceeding $5 billion. The popularity of AI applications was further underscored by download figures, which doubled year-over-year to reach 3.8 billion.

Several key factors propelled the segment's expansion. The widespread consumer adoption of AI assistants was a major driver, with all ten of the top-downloaded apps falling into this category. Leading the group were OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GoogleGemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone was responsible for a remarkable$3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue, a figure that was previously reported late last year.

User engagement with generative AI apps skyrocketed in 2025. Consumers spent 48 billion hours using these applications, which is 3.6 times the total for 2024 and ten times the level seen in 2023. The volume of app sessions—the number of times users opened and used an app—surpassed one trillion. Notably, this session growth was outpacing download growth, indicating that existing users were deepening their engagement faster than the apps were acquiring new ones.

Heavy investment from major technology companies also fueled adoption and revenue. Firms like Google, Microsoft, and X have been aggressively developing their AI assistants to compete with ChatGPT, rapidly rolling out enhanced capabilities. Improvements were seen across coding assistance, content generation, reasoning, task execution, and accuracy, with specific advances noted in image and video generation models like ChatGPT's GPT-4o and Google's Nano Banana. This competitive push reshaped the market: OpenAI and DeepSeek together accounted for nearly 50% of global downloads, up from 21% in 2024. Simultaneously, big tech publishers increased their market share from 14% to nearly 30%, displacing earlier competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

The report emphasized mobile's critical role as the primary access point for generative AI services. By the end of 2025, Sensor Tower estimates the total audience for AI assistants in the U.S. topped 200 million, with more than half (110 million) accessing these tools exclusively on mobile devices—a dramatic increase from only about 13 million mobile-only users in 2024. Beyond assistants, other popular AI apps included the music generator Suno, ByteDance’s text-to-video app Jimeng AI, and AI companion apps like Character.ai and PolyBuzz.

While generative AI was a dominant force, it was not the sole contributor to app revenue growth. The report noted that other categories, including social media, video streaming, and productivity applications, also provided significant momentum. For example, consumers spent an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps in 2025, amounting to nearly 2.5 trillion total hours—a 5% increase from the year before.