Generative AI applications have experienced a remarkable surge in popularity and profitability during the first half of 2025. According to Sensor Tower’s latest report, these innovative apps were downloaded 1.7 billion times, a significant increase from 1 billion in the latter half of 2024. Furthermore, in-app revenues have soared, reaching $1.87 billion, a sizable jump from $932 million in H2 2024.
Users are not only downloading these apps more frequently but are also engaging with them extensively. In the first half of 2025, users spent an impressive 15.6 billion hours on Generative AI apps, marking an increase from 8.5 billion hours in the previous period, across 426 billion sessions.
Asia has emerged as the fastest-growing market, taking the lead in downloads with a 42.6% share, primarily due to the enthusiastic adoption in markets like India and Mainland China. The region posted an 80% growth in downloads, outpacing Europe’s 51% and North America’s 39%.
While Latin America saw the most substantial growth in in-app purchases, North America still commands the largest market share at 40%.
ChatGPT continues its upward trajectory, dominating in-app revenue worldwide, except in China, where Deepseek surpassed it in downloads soon after its launch. ChatGPT remains the favored choice, with users spending over 12 days monthly on average using the app. Other popular AI apps include Character AI, PolyBuzz, DeepSeek, and Perplexity.
ChatGPT’s engagement metrics are impressive, paralleling popular social platforms like X and Reddit. It has demonstrated improved weekend usage, underscoring its utility beyond just work-related tasks. The report highlights that ChatGPT’s usage patterns increasingly resemble those of primary search tools like Google, utilized across various daily activities.
The app is not just limited to searching; users are leveraging it for advice on health, wellness, shopping, personal finance, and meal preparation. In the second quarter of 2025, over a third of ChatGPT’s prompts were lifestyle and entertainment-related.
In the U.S., more than 15% of ChatGPT users access the app via both web and mobile platforms, a figure that surpasses other popular platforms such as Temu and Threads. Despite its progress, ChatGPT still trails behind giants like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, and Amazon, which enjoy more than 25% cross-platform user access.
The term “AI” is now widespread in app descriptions, appearing over 100,000 times across major app stores. AI-focused apps were downloaded 7.5 billion times in H1 2025, representing about 10% of total app downloads. Many apps across diverse categories, including AI assistants, content generation, photo editing, nutrition, test prep, and language translation, have incorporated AI-related terms to great effect.
Incorporating “AI” or “LLM” into app names or descriptions has provided a temporary boost in downloads, illustrating the consumer interest in AI-powered solutions.
