Generative AI apps experienced remarkable growth in both downloads and in-app revenue during the first half of 2025, according to a report by market intelligence firm SensorTower. Users downloaded these apps 1.7 billion times, up from 1 billion in the second half of 2024. In-app revenue also doubled, reaching $1.87 billion compared to $932 million in the previous half-year period. Additionally, users spent over 15.6 billion hours on GenAI apps in H1 2025, a significant increase from 8.5 billion hours in H2 2024, recorded across 426 billion sessions.
Asia emerged as the fastest-growing market for GenAI apps, capturing 42.6% of global downloads, driven by strong demand in India and Mainland China. The region saw an 80% growth in downloads, outpacing Europe (51%) and North America (39%). Meanwhile, Latin America recorded the highest growth in in-app purchases, though North America maintained the largest market share at 40%.
ChatGPT remained the top-performing app in terms of in-app revenue across most countries, except China, where DeepSeek led in downloads shortly after its launch. Users spent an average of over 12 days per month on ChatGPT in H1 2025, surpassing other AI assistants like Character AI, PolyBuzz, DeepSeek, and Perplexity. ChatGPT’s engagement levels rivaled platforms like X and Reddit, with only Google seeing higher average monthly usage.
The report highlighted ChatGPT’s expanding role beyond work-related tasks, with increased weekend usage indicating broader consumer reliance. Daily usage reached 16 minutes, narrowing the gap with top search engines and browsers, which averaged 18.2 minutes. Users increasingly turned to ChatGPT for lifestyle and entertainment prompts, accounting for over a third of queries in Q2 2025. Health and wellness, shopping, personal finance, and meal prep advice were also common use cases.
While ChatGPT gained traction across both mobile and web platforms, with over 15% of U.S. users accessing it via both, it still lagged behind services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, and Amazon, which saw more than 25% cross-platform usage.
The report also noted a surge in apps incorporating “AI” in their names and descriptions, appearing over 100,000 times across the App Store and Play Store. AI-related apps accounted for 10% of total downloads, with 7.5 billion installs in H1 2025. Categories such as AI assistants, content generation, photo editing, and education increasingly adopted AI branding, though the boost in downloads from such naming strategies was often short-lived.
SensorTower observed that apps adding terms like “AI” or “LLM” saw temporary spikes in downloads, reflecting the growing consumer interest in AI-powered solutions. However, sustained success depended on functionality rather than branding alone.