Consumers spend more on AI and utility apps than mobile games: Report

The global mobile app spend marked a significant turning point in 2025, with more money being spent on apps other than mobile games. Based on an annual mobile market report by market research firm Sensor Tower, mobile app spend increased by 21% year over year, with people spending about $85 billion on apps.

The number is almost three times as high as the total expenditure five years ago, which shows a shift in user behaviour as well as a surge in AI-based services.

One major contributor to this trend was the rise in the use of generative AI. According to Sensor Tower, in-app purchase sales in generative AI applications increased more than three times in 2025 to over $5 billion. Downloads of applications using AI also doubled to 3.8 billion annually.

AI assistants were the most popular among users, with all apps in the top 10 most downloaded belonging to this genre. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek were among the most downloaded apps. ChatGPT accounted for $3.4 billion in in-app purchase sales alone.

The use of generative AI apps increased substantially. The number of hours consumers spent on generative AI apps in 2025 reached 48 billion hours. The number increased by a factor of 3.6 compared to 2024. The figure is a ten times increase compared to 2023.

The number of sessions exceeded one trillion. The growth rate of sessions exceeded that of downloads. Users are spending more hours on the apps.

According to a report by Sensor Tower, the heavy investment in the industry by Google, Microsoft, and X has led to a faster pace of innovation in the area of AI assistants. Enhancements in image and video creation, reasoning, coding, and execution have contributed to the growing adoption of the technology, according to the report.

Among the AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek cumulatively held almost half of the downloads, with big tech companies raising their market shares to almost 30%.