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

In 2025, consumers spent more money on non-game mobile apps than they did on games for the first time, according to the findings from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s annual “State of Mobile” report. While this milestone had been seen in particular markets, like the U.S., or during certain quarters, 2025 marked the first time it occurred globally. Worldwide, consumers spent approximately $85 billion on apps last year, representing a 21% year-over-year increase. The figure was also nearly 2.8x the amount spent just five years ago.

Generative AI, a defining trend over the past year, led the revenue growth, as in-app purchase revenue in this category more than tripled to top $5 billion in 2025. Downloads of AI apps also grew, doubling year-over-year to reach 3.8 billion.

The segment’s growth can be attributed to several factors. For one, the popularity of AI assistants among consumers was a large driver, with all of the top 10 apps by downloads being AI assistants. This group was led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone generated $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase (IAP) revenue — a figure that we reported on late last year.

In 2025, consumers spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps, or 3.6x the total time spent in 2024 and 10x the level seen in 2023. Session volume, meaning the number of times users opened and used an app, topped 1 trillion in 2025. Of note, this figure was growing faster than downloads, suggesting that existing users were deepening their engagement faster than the apps were adding new users.

Another factor driving AI app revenue and adoption is that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and X have been heavily investing in their AI assistants to challenge ChatGPT. Over the past year, they’ve been rolling out new capabilities at a rapid pace, improving in areas like coding assistance, content generation, reasoning, task execution, accuracy, and more. The report specifically called out improvements in image and video generation, like 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, Big Tech publishers grew their share of the market from 14% to nearly 30% during this same time, crowding out earlier ChatGPT competitors like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

The report also highlighted the role that mobile plays in connecting users to generative AI services. Sensor Tower estimates that the total audience for AI assistants topped 200 million in the U.S. by year end, and more than half (110 million) were accessing the assistants exclusively on mobile devices. In 2024, for comparison, only around 13 million users were mobile-only.

Beyond assistants, other popular AI apps included the AI music generation app Suno; ByteDance’s text-to-video app, Jimeng AI; and AI companion apps like Character.ai and Polybuzz.

However, AI wasn’t the only revenue driver last year, Sensor Tower found. Other apps, including those in categories like social media, video streaming, and productivity, also helped fuel the growth, the report noted. For instance, consumers spent an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps, totaling nearly 2.5 trillion hours, up 5% year-over-year.