Shoppers spent extra on cell apps than video games in 2025, pushed by AI app adoption

In 2025, customers spent extra money on non-game cell apps than they did on video games for the primary time, in keeping with the findings from market intelligence agency Sensor Tower’s annual “State of Mobile” report. While this milestone had been seen specifically markets, just like the U.S., or during certain quarters, 2025 marked the primary time it occurred globally. Worldwide, customers spent roughly $85 billion on apps final 12 months, representing a 21% year-over-year enhance. The determine was additionally almost 2.8x the quantity spent simply 5 years in the past.

Generative AI, a defining development over the previous 12 months, led the income development, as in-app buy income on this class greater than tripled to high $5 billion in 2025. Downloads of AI apps additionally grew, doubling year-over-year to achieve 3.8 billion.

The section’s development could be attributed to a number of elements. For one, the recognition of AI assistants amongst customers was a big driver, with the entire high 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 world in-app buy (IAP) income — a determine that we reported on late final 12 months.

In 2025, customers spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps, or 3.6x the entire time spent in 2024 and 10x the extent seen in 2023. Session quantity, that means the variety of occasions customers opened and used an app, topped one trillion in 2025. Of be aware, this determine was rising sooner than downloads, suggesting that current customers have been deepening their engagement sooner than the apps have been including new customers.

Another issue driving AI app income and adoption is that large tech firms like Google, Microsoft, and X have been closely investing of their AI assistants to problem ChatGPT. Over the previous 12 months, they’ve been rolling out new capabilities at a fast tempo, bettering in areas like coding help, content material era, reasoning, process execution, accuracy, and extra. The report particularly referred to as out enhancements in picture and video era, like ChatGPT’s GPT-4o picture era mannequin launched in March, and Google’s Nano Banana.

Among the highest AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek accounted for almost 50% of world downloads, up from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, large tech publishers grew their share of the market from 14% to just about 30% throughout this similar time, crowding out earlier ChatGPT rivals like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

The report additionally highlighted the function that cell performs in connecting customers to generative AI companies. Sensor Tower estimates that the entire viewers for AI assistants topped 200 million within the U.S. by year-end, and greater than half (110M) have been accessing the assistants completely on cell gadgets. In 2024, for comparability, solely round 13 million customers have been mobile-only.

Beyond assistants, different well-liked AI apps included the AI music era app Suno; ByteDance’s text-to-video app, Jimeng AI; and AI companion apps like Character.ai and PolyBuzz.

However, AI wasn’t the one income driver final 12 months, Sensor Tower discovered. Other apps, together with these in classes like social media, video streaming, and productiveness, additionally helped gas the expansion, the report famous. For occasion, customers spent a mean of 90 minutes per day on social media apps, totaling almost 2.5 trillion hours, up 5% year-over-year.