Generative AI (GenAI) apps experienced rapid growth in the first half of 2025. According to a report by marketing analytics firm Sensor Tower, users downloaded these apps 1.7 billion times, a significant increase from 1 billion downloads in the second half of 2024. Revenue generated from these apps also doubled, reaching $1.87 billion compared to $932 million in the previous period.
Users spent a total of 15.6 billion hours on GenAI apps in the first half of 2025, up from 8.5 billion hours in the second half of 2024. In total, 426 billion sessions were recorded.
The Asia region was the fastest-growing market for GenAI apps, accounting for 42.6% of downloads, driven largely by major markets like India and China. Downloads in Asia increased by 80% in the first half of 2025, compared to 51% in Europe and 39% in North America.
Latin America showed the fastest growth in in-app purchases, but North America maintained its lead with a 40% market share.
ChatGPT’s Rise
Sensor Tower reports that ChatGPT was the top-grossing app in almost every country except China, where the app DeepSeek led in downloads.
Users are increasingly using AI assistants, with ChatGPT leading the way. In the first half of 2025, users spent an average of 12 days per month on ChatGPT. Other popular AI apps include Character AI, PolyBuzz, DeepSeek, and Perplexity.
ChatGPT shows strong user retention. Sensor Tower notes that ChatGPT user engagement is comparable to social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit. Only Google surpasses ChatGPT in average monthly usage time. Weekend usage of ChatGPT has also increased compared to last year, indicating that people use the app not only for work but also for personal purposes.
The report highlights that ChatGPT’s usage time is approaching that of major search engines and browsers. For example, in the first half of 2025, ChatGPT’s average daily usage was 16 minutes compared to 18.2 minutes for Google.
Users employ ChatGPT not only for search but also for health advice, shopping, personal finance, and meal preparation. In the second quarter of 2025, more than a third of prompts to ChatGPT were related to lifestyle and entertainment.
ChatGPT is growing its user base on both mobile and web platforms. In the US, over 15% of users access ChatGPT through both web and mobile apps, higher than platforms like Temu and Threads. However, tech giants like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, and Amazon lead with over 25% of users accessing their services across both platforms.
The Growing Popularity of “AI” in Apps
Sensor Tower’s report states that the term “AI” appears over 100,000 times in app descriptions on both the App Store and Play Store. In the first half of 2025, users downloaded AI-related apps 7.5 billion times, making up about 10% of total downloads.
Over the past 12 months, apps in categories such as AI assistants, content creation, photo editing, nutrition, test prep, tutoring, translation, and hobbies have increasingly included AI-related terms.
Many top-charting apps now include “AI” in their names. However, this addition generally provides only a short-term boost in downloads.
Sensor Tower notes that apps adding terms like “AI” or “LLM” in their names or descriptions see noticeable download increases for a limited time.
