Consumers Spend More on Mobile Apps Than Games in 2025, Fueled by AI Boom

For the first time ever, global spending on non-game mobile apps outpaced spending on mobile games, according to Sensor Tower’s annual State of Mobile report. While certain markets like the U.S. had previously seen this shift during select quarters, 2025 marked the first year it happened worldwide. Overall, consumers spent roughly $85 billion on apps, a 21% increase from 2024 and nearly 2.8 times the amount spent five years ago.

A major driver of this growth was generative AI, which saw in-app purchase revenue triple, surpassing $5 billion in 2025. AI app downloads also doubled year-over-year, reaching 3.8 billion.

Several factors contributed to the surge. AI assistants were particularly popular, dominating the top 10 apps by downloads. Leading the pack were OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek, with ChatGPT alone generating $3.4 billion in global in-app purchases.

Engagement with AI apps also skyrocketed. In 2025, users spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps 3.6 times more than in 2024 and 10 times the total from 2023. Session volume, or the number of times users opened an app, exceeded 1 trillion, growing faster than downloads, signaling that existing users were increasingly active and engaged.

Another key factor driving AI adoption is heavy investment from Big Tech. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and X have been rapidly rolling out new capabilities to compete with ChatGPT, enhancing features in coding, content creation, reasoning, task execution, and multimedia generation. Notable advancements included ChatGPT’s GPT-4o image generation and Google’s Nano Banana for video creation.

Among AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek accounted for nearly 50% of global downloads, up from 21% in 2024, while Big Tech publishers grew from 14% to nearly 30%, edging out earlier competitors like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

Mobile devices have been central to this growth. Sensor Tower estimates that by year-end, the U.S. audience for AI assistants surpassed 200 million, with 110 million users accessing them exclusively via mobile a huge jump from just 13 million in 2024. Beyond assistants, popular AI apps included Suno (AI music generation), Jimeng AI (text-to-video by ByteDance), and AI companions like Character.ai and Polybuzz.

AI wasn’t the only category fueling app revenue. Social media, video streaming, and productivity apps also contributed to growth. On average, consumers spent 90 minutes per day on social media, totaling nearly 2.5 trillion hours a 5% increase from the previous year.

The 2025 mobile landscape clearly shows that AI is reshaping how people interact with apps, driving not just downloads but deep engagement, and signaling a new era where apps extend far beyond gaming.