In a historic shift for the digital economy, global consumer spending on non-game mobile applications officially overtook spending on mobile games in 2025. This pivotal milestone, confirmed by market intelligence leader Sensor Tower in its annual “State of Mobile” report, signals a fundamental change in how users value and monetize their smartphone time, with generative AI applications acting as the primary catalyst for this unprecedented revenue growth.
Mobile Apps Surpass Games in Global Consumer Spending
For years, the mobile gaming sector dominated app store revenue, consistently accounting for the lion’s share of consumer in-app purchases (IAP). However, 2025 marked a definitive turning point. According to Sensor Tower’s comprehensive data, consumers worldwide spent approximately $85 billion on non-game apps last year. This figure represents a substantial 21% year-over-year increase and is nearly 2.8 times the amount spent just five years prior. While specific markets like the United States had shown this trend in isolation, 2025 was the first year it occurred on a global scale, underscoring a universal behavioral shift.
The transition from gaming to utility and productivity-focused spending reflects the smartphone’s evolution from an entertainment device to an essential tool for work, creativity, and daily life management. Consequently, the revenue growth was not concentrated in a single category but was broadly distributed across social media, video streaming, and productivity applications. For instance, Sensor Tower noted that users spent an average of 90 minutes daily on social media apps, contributing to nearly 2.5 trillion total hours—a 5% annual increase.
Generative AI Apps Drive Unprecedented Revenue Growth
The most significant driver of this spending revolution was the explosive adoption of generative AI applications. Revenue from in-app purchases within the AI category more than tripled in 2025, surpassing $5 billion. Downloads for AI apps also saw meteoric growth, doubling year-over-year to reach 3.8 billion global installs. This surge was led overwhelmingly by AI assistants, which occupied all ten top spots for downloads. The segment was dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek.
ChatGPT alone generated a staggering $3.4 billion in global IAP revenue in 2025, cementing its position as a commercial powerhouse. Beyond raw revenue, user engagement metrics painted an even more compelling picture of AI’s integration into daily life. Consumers spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps last year—3.6 times the total for 2024 and a tenfold increase from 2023 levels.
The Deepening Engagement of Existing Users
A critical insight from the data is that session volume, meaning the number of times users opened and actively used an app, topped one trillion in 2025. Notably, this metric grew faster than new downloads, indicating that existing users were deepening their engagement more rapidly than apps were acquiring new ones. This trend suggests a move beyond initial curiosity toward sustained, habitual use of AI tools for a widening array of tasks.
Sensor Tower estimates that the total audience for AI assistants in the U.S. alone exceeded 200 million by the end of 2025. Remarkably, more than half of these users (110 million) accessed AI assistants exclusively on mobile devices, a dramatic increase from only 13 million mobile-only users in 2024. This highlights the central role smartphones play as the primary gateway to advanced AI services for a massive global user base.
Big Tech Intensifies the AI App Competition
The rapid market expansion attracted fierce competition from major technology firms. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and X (formerly Twitter) invested heavily to challenge ChatGPT’s early dominance. Throughout 2025, these players rolled out enhanced capabilities at a breakneck pace, improving their assistants’ performance in coding, content generation, complex reasoning, task execution, and accuracy.
The report specifically highlighted advancements in multimodal AI, such as improved image and video generation models. Key releases included OpenAI’s GPT-4o image model in March and Google’s experimental “Nano Banana” project. This competitive fervor led to significant market share shifts. While OpenAI and DeepSeek together accounted for nearly 50% of global AI app downloads (up from 21% in 2024), other big tech publishers grew their collective share from 14% to nearly 30%. This growth crowded out earlier competitors like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.
The AI app landscape extended far beyond text-based assistants. Other popular categories contributing to growth included:
- Suno: An AI-powered music generation app.
- Jimeng AI: ByteDance’s text-to-video creation tool.
- AI Companion Apps: Platforms like Character.ai and PolyBuzz, which offer interactive AI relationships.
Broader Market Context and Implications
This shift in spending has profound implications for developers, investors, and the tech industry at large. For a decade, the app store economy was synonymous with gaming. The new data proves that sustainable, high-revenue business models are now firmly established in non-gaming sectors, particularly those leveraging advanced AI. This will likely redirect venture capital and developer talent toward utility and productivity-focused applications.
Furthermore, the data underscores the importance of the mobile platform for the future of AI. Despite the power of desktop and cloud-based AI, the convenience, accessibility, and personal nature of smartphones make them the ideal vessel for everyday AI interaction. The report validates a strategy of “mobile-first” or “mobile-native” AI development, as evidenced by the 110 million U.S. users who engage with AI solely on their phones.
Conclusion
The year 2025 will be remembered as the moment consumer spending on mobile apps definitively eclipsed spending on mobile games, a transition powerfully fueled by the generative AI revolution. The tripling of AI app revenue to over $5 billion, coupled with skyrocketing engagement hours and session volume, demonstrates that AI has moved from a niche novelty to a core, monetizable smartphone utility. As big tech companies continue to innovate and compete in this space, and as users deepen their reliance on mobile AI for work and creativity, this trend is poised to accelerate, reshaping the app economy’s fundamentals for years to come.
FAQs
Q1: What was the total global consumer spending on non-game mobile apps in 2025?
According to Sensor Tower, consumers spent approximately $85 billion on non-game mobile apps globally in 2025, a 21% increase from the previous year.
Q2: How much did revenue from AI apps grow in 2025?
In-app purchase revenue from generative AI applications more than tripled in 2025, topping $5 billion for the first time.
Q3: Which AI app was the top revenue generator?
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the leading revenue generator, alone accounting for $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue in 2025.
Q4: How has user engagement with AI apps changed?
Engagement has deepened significantly. Users spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps in 2025, and the number of app sessions (opens and uses) exceeded one trillion, growing faster than new downloads.
Q5: What role did mobile devices play in AI adoption?
Mobile is the primary access point for many users. In the U.S., over 110 million people accessed AI assistants exclusively via mobile devices in 2025, up from just 13 million in 2024.
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