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

In a groundbreaking shift, 2025 marked the first year that global consumer spending on non-gaming mobile applications outpaced expenditures on games, as reported by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower in their annual "State of Mobile" report. This significant trend, already observed in specific markets like the U.S. during certain quarters, has now become a worldwide phenomenon. Globally, consumers invested an estimated $85 billion in mobile apps last year, reflecting a remarkable 21% increase from the previous year. This amount is nearly 2.8 times higher than what was recorded just five years earlier. The surge in spending can largely be attributed to the rapid adoption of generative AI applications, which saw in-app purchase revenues more than tripling to exceed $5 billion in 2025. The rise in AI app downloads mirrored this trend, doubling from the previous year to reach 3.8 billion. A range of factors contributed to this explosive growth. Notably, AI assistants captured consumer interest, dominating the download charts with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek leading the pack. ChatGPT alone generated a staggering $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue. Consumers engaged with generative AI apps for an impressive 48 billion hours in 2025, marking a 3.6-fold increase from the previous year and a tenfold rise compared to 2023. The volume of app sessions surpassed one trillion, indicating that existing users were increasingly engaged, outpacing new user acquisitions. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and X have significantly invested in their AI capabilities to compete with ChatGPT, rapidly introducing new features that enhance areas such as coding support, content creation, and task management. The report highlighted advancements in image and video generation, exemplified by the release of ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model and Google’s Nano Banana. OpenAI and DeepSeek now represent nearly half of all global downloads among AI app publishers, a rise from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, major tech companies expanded their market share from 14% to almost 30%, overtaking previous competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith. The report also emphasized the vital role of mobile devices in connecting users to generative AI services, estimating that by year-end, over 200 million individuals in the U.S. were utilizing AI assistants, with more than half relying exclusively on mobile platforms. In addition to AI applications, other sectors, including social media and productivity apps, contributed to the overall revenue growth. For instance, users spent an average of 90 minutes daily on social media platforms, leading to a total of nearly 2.5 trillion hours logged, representing a 5% increase from the prior year.