Gen AI apps doubled their revenue, grew to 1.7B downloads in first half of 2025

The first half of 2025 marked an impressive expansion for generative AI applications, as revealed by a recent report from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. In this period, these apps amassed a staggering 1.7 billion downloads, a significant increase from 1 billion in the latter half of 2024. In terms of financial performance, generative AI apps doubled their in-app revenue, reaching $1.87 billion, up from $932 million in the previous six months. Users dedicated over 15.6 billion hours to these applications, a sharp rise from 8.5 billion hours in the last half of 2024, with activity logged over 426 billion sessions. Asia emerged as the leading market for generative AI apps, capturing 42.6% of total downloads, largely driven by the robust performance in India and Mainland China. The region experienced an 80% increase in download growth, outpacing Europe’s 51% and North America’s 39% growth rates. While Latin America showed the highest surge in in-app purchases, North America retained the largest market share at 40%. Among the various applications, ChatGPT consistently ranked as the top performer in terms of in-app revenue across most countries, except for China where Deepseek took the lead in downloads shortly after its launch. Users are increasingly engaging with AI assistants, with ChatGPT leading the way, averaging over 12 days of use per month during the first half of the year. ChatGPT’s user engagement has been notable, drawing comparisons to platforms like X and Reddit in terms of daily usage. The app's weekend engagement has also grown, suggesting users are turning to AI assistance for more than just work-related tasks. The report indicated that ChatGPT's average daily usage reached 16 minutes, closely trailing the leading search engines and browsers. Beyond mere queries, users are leveraging ChatGPT for a variety of life aspects, including health, shopping, personal finance, and meal preparation. Notably, over a third of prompts in the second quarter of 2025 pertained to lifestyle and entertainment topics. Additionally, the report highlighted that over 15% of ChatGPT users in the U.S. access the service through both web and mobile platforms, a figure that surpasses other apps like Temu and Threads. Despite its advancements, ChatGPT still trails behind major platforms like Google and Facebook, which see more than 25% of their users engaging across both web and mobile. The report further noted that the term 'AI' appears over 100,000 times in app descriptions across both the App Store and Google Play. Apps incorporating 'AI' in their titles experienced a notable uptick in downloads, indicating that such terminology continues to resonate with users, albeit often providing only a temporary boost in popularity.