TechTheDay

Mobile finally broke one of its oldest habits in 2025. For the first time, consumers spent more money on non-game apps than on games, pushing global app spend to roughly $85 billion. That represented a 21% jump in a single year and almost 2.8 times what users spent just five years earlier. The shift didn’t come from a new puzzle hit or viral shooter. It came from a new center of gravity: generative AI. Phones turned from simple content windows into active partners for work, creativity, and everyday decisions.

Generative AI Turns Into a Billion-Dollar Category

Generative AI didn’t just add a line item to mobile revenue; it became the main growth story. In-app purchase revenue from AI apps more than tripled in 2025, crossing the $5 billion mark. Downloads doubled year-over-year to reach about 3.8 billion, which means this trend came from mainstream demand, not a small group of early adopters. AI assistants sat squarely at the center. All of the top 10 AI apps by downloads fell into the assistant category, led by ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone generated around $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase revenue, proving that users now treat these tools as ongoing services worth paying for.

Engagement Explodes: From Testing to Dependence

Money tells one story, time tells a louder one. Consumers spent roughly 48 billion hours in generative AI apps in 2025. That came in at 3.6 times the total in 2024 and ten times what users logged in 2023. Session volume broke through 1 trillion, which means people kept opening these apps again and again throughout the day. That growth in sessions outpaced downloads, a classic sign that existing users grew more engaged even as new users joined. The pattern signals a shift from trial to reliance. AI assistants no longer sit in the folder of experimental apps. They sit next to messaging, email, and social media as fixtures in daily mobile behavior.

Big Tech Muscles In and Reshapes the Competitive Map

Once AI assistants proved their revenue power, Big Tech refused to stay on the sidelines. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and X poured resources into their own assistants to challenge ChatGPT. They rolled out rapid upgrades in coding help, content generation, reasoning, task execution, and accuracy. Image and video generation jumped forward as well, with models like ChatGPT’s GPT-4o and Google’s Nano Banana setting new expectations for quality and speed. Market share shifted fast. OpenAI and DeepSeek together captured nearly half of global AI downloads, up from 21% in 2024. At the same time, Big Tech publishers expanded their share from about 14% to almost 30%, squeezing earlier ChatGPT-style competitors such as Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith into a far tighter corner.

Mobile as the Main AI Gateway and the Wider App Context

The report makes one point very clear: mobile now acts as the primary bridge to generative AI services. In the U.S., the total audience for AI assistants reached about 200 million by the end of 2025. More than half of that group—around 110 million people—used assistants only on mobile, a massive jump from roughly 13 million mobile-only users a year earlier. The AI boom doesn’t stop at chat-style assistants. Suno brought AI into music generation, ByteDance’s Jimeng AI pushed text-to-video creation, and AI companions like Character.ai and Polybuzz created new forms of social and emotional interaction. At the same time, other categories still pulled in huge attention. Social media users spent about 90 minutes per day on these apps, adding up to nearly 2.5 trillion hours, a 5% increase that keeps social at the center of mobile time.

The 2025 data doesn’t just show growth; it shows a power shift inside the app economy. Non-game apps finally outran games in global spending, powered by a sharp rise in generative AI tools that turned smartphones into flexible assistants and creative engines. Big Tech’s aggressive push, combined with soaring engagement and a surge in mobile-only AI usage, signals a new baseline for what users expect from apps. Social, streaming, and productivity services still anchor daily time, but the strategic direction is unmistakable. The next wave of mobile winners will treat AI as the core product, not an optional feature.