Global mobile spending on non-game apps overtakes games in 2025

For the first time globally, consumer spending on non-game mobile apps surpassed spending on mobile games in 2025. According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s annual “State of Mobile” report, worldwide consumer spending on apps reached approximately $85 billion last year. This milestone represents a 21% year-over-year increase in global app spending, a figure that is nearly 2.8x the amount spent five years ago.

The primary catalyst for this shift was the rapid monetization of generative AI apps. In-app purchase (IAP)—revenue generated from within an application—for the generative AI category more than tripled to top $5 billion in 2025, while downloads of AI apps doubled year-over-year to reach 3.8 billion.

Key metrics highlighting the growth of generative AI apps in 2025 include:

• Revenue: OpenAI’s ChatGPT alone generated $3.4 billion in global IAP revenue.
• Engagement: Consumers spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps, representing 3.6x the total time spent in 2024 and 10x the level seen in 2023.
• Usage: Session volume—the number of times users opened and used an app—topped 1 trillion, growing faster than downloads and indicating deepening user engagement.

This growth has intensified competition among publishers. OpenAI and DeepSeek dominated the market, accounting for nearly 50% of global AI app downloads in 2025, up from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, Big Tech publishers—including Google, Microsoft, and X—heavily invested in their own AI assistants to challenge ChatGPT. These companies grew their combined market share from 14% in 2024 to nearly 30% in 2025. This rapid expansion crowded out earlier ChatGPT competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

Mobile has become the primary gateway for these services. In the U.S., the total audience for AI assistants topped 200 million by the end of 2025, with 110 million users accessing them exclusively on mobile devices—a massive increase from around 13 million mobile-only users in 2024. Beyond AI assistants, consumers adopted other generative AI apps, including the AI music generation app Suno, ByteDance’s text-to-video app Jimeng AI, and AI companion apps like Character.ai and Polybuzz. Despite the AI surge, traditional categories maintained strong engagement; consumers spent an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps, totaling nearly 2.5 trillion hours, which is up 5% year-over-year.

Why it matters

For the first time globally, consumer spending on non-game mobile apps surpassed spending on games in 2025, a shift driven by the rapid adoption and monetization of generative AI applications. This transition marks a structural realignment of mobile economics, as utility and AI-driven engagement begin to outpace traditional mobile entertainment.