In the first half of 2025, Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, reported that Generative AI apps experienced substantial growth in both in-app revenue and downloads.
In comparison to the 1 billion downloads in H2 2024, users downloaded GenAI apps 1.7 billion times. The in-app revenue generated by these applications doubled in H1 2025, reaching $1.87 billion from $932 million in H2 2024.

The report observed that users spent more than 15.6 billion hours on GenAI applications in the first half of 2025, a significant increase from the 8.5 billion hours spent in H2 2024. Over 426 billion sessions were registered during this period.
Thanks to markets such as India and Mainland China, Asia was the fastest-growing market for GenAI apps and also assumed the lead in terms of market share in terms of downloads with 42.6%.

In H1 2025, Asia experienced an 80% increase in downloads, while Europe and North America experienced a 51% and 39% percent growth, respectively.
Although Latin America experienced the most significant increase in in-app purchases for GenAI applications, North America continues to dominate the market with a 40% share.

Sensor Tower observed that ChatGPT was the most successful app in terms of in-app revenue in all countries except China.
Nevertheless, China’s DeepSeek demonstrated superior performance in terms of the number of downloads in the weeks following the launch.
Additionally, individuals are dedicating an increasing amount of time to various AI assistants, with ChatGPT being the most popular.
The app was utilized by individuals for an average of over 12 days per month in H1. Character AI, PolyBuzz, DeepSeek, and Perplexity were additional applications that were highly popular.

ChatGPT has demonstrated remarkable persistence. According to Sensor Tower, the number of individuals utilizing OpenAI’s application is comparable to that of X and Reddit.
The only company that has a higher rate for the average number of days used per month is Google.
The report also indicated that ChatGPT’s weekend utilization has increased in comparison to the previous year, indicating that individuals are increasingly relying on the AI-powered messaging app for purposes beyond their professional responsibilities.

The report stated that this development has resulted in the app’s utilization patterns becoming more similar to those of Google, which consumers utilize as their primary search utility both during and outside of work hours.
The discrepancy between the utilization of ChatGPT and the usage of applications in the top search engine and browser categories has diminished over time.

For example, ChatGPT had an average daily usage of 16 minutes in H1 2025, while the top search engine and browser had an average daily usage of 18.2 minutes.
In addition to search, ChatGPT is also being utilized by users for health and wellness, purchasing, personal finance, and meal planning advice.

According to the report, lifestyle and entertainment were the subjects of over one-third of the prompts utilized on ChatGPT in Q2 2025.
Sensor Tower observed that ChatGPT is expanding its user base on both mobile applications and platforms.
It was stated that over 15% of ChatGPT users in the United States access it via mobile and web, which is a higher percentage than other platforms such as Threads and Temu.

Although ChatGPT has made strides, it remains in the shadow of other platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, and Amazon, which have over 25% of their users accessing the service on both mobile and web.
The intelligence firm reported in its report that the term “AI” is now used more than 100,000 times in app descriptions on both the App Store and the Play Store. In the first half of 2025, users downloaded apps that referenced AI 7.5 billion times, which constituted approximately 10% of the total number of downloads.

In the past year, an increasing number of applications in the following categories have incorporated AI-related terms: AI assistant, AI content generation, Photo Editing, Nutrition & Diet, Test Prep, Tutoring & Studying, Translation, and Other Hobbies & Interest Services.
Currently, an increasing number of applications in the top listings of various categories include the term “AI” in their titles. Nevertheless, this addition only provides a temporary increase in downloads.

Sensor Tower reported that “apps that incorporated terms such as ‘AI’ or ‘LLM’ into their names or descriptions experienced a substantial increase in downloads in the months that followed.”