Something quietly historic happened in the mobile app economy in 2025. For the first time, consumers globally spent more on non-gaming apps than on games. The catalyst, more than any single trend, was generative artificial intelligence.
Something quietly historic happened in the mobile app economy in 2025, and it did not involve a viral social platform or a hit mobile game. For the first time in the history of app store tracking, consumers globally spent more money on non-gaming apps than they did on games. According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower's annual State of Mobile report, worldwide spending on non-game apps hit approximately $85 billion last year, a 21 percent increase over the prior year, while gaming revenue came in at around $81.8 billion. The catalyst behind this structural shift, more than any single trend, was generative artificial intelligence.
The numbers tell a story that would have been hard to believe even three years ago. In-app purchase revenue in the generative AI category more than tripled in 2025, topping $5 billion globally, and downloads of AI apps doubled year over year to reach 3.8 billion. Users also spent 48 billion hours inside generative AI apps last year, which works out to roughly 3.6 times the total from 2024 and ten times what was logged in 2023. The pace of engagement is striking. App sessions topped one trillion in 2025, and crucially, that number was growing faster than new downloads, meaning existing users were becoming more dependent on AI tools rather than the growth being driven purely by new adopters.
The poster child for all of this is ChatGPT. Consumers spent an estimated $2.48 billion in the ChatGPT mobile app during 2025 alone, representing a 408 percent year-over-year increase from the $487 million spent in 2024. By December 2025, the app had crossed $3 billion in cumulative mobile consumer spending, reaching that milestone in just 31 months. For context, TikTok took 58 months to do the same, while Disney+ needed 42 months. ChatGPT ranked as the second highest-grossing app on the iOS App Store in 2025, trailing only YouTube, and became the most downloaded app globally for the year, surpassing TikTok and Instagram, which had traded that title back and forth for the better part of half a decade.
What is significant here is not just the ChatGPT story in isolation. The broader App Store is being reshuffled by AI in ways that go beyond a single product. Fifteen different app categories have added AI-related terminology to their names or descriptions over the past two years, covering everything from productivity and education to finance, lifestyle, and music, as apps across the board rush to embed AI capabilities into their core features. Tools like Duolingo and Strava have rolled out AI-driven personalization features, and a new class of apps built entirely around AI assistance is emerging and finding paying audiences at a pace that legacy app categories never managed. Apple's App Store revenue rose 10 percent year over year in the company's fiscal fourth quarter of 2025, reaching $8.7 billion, while the revenue mix continues to shift away from gaming, which now accounts for 45 percent of App Store revenue, down from historic levels above 50 percent.
The subscription model is the mechanism making all of this work. Unlike the older model of one-time paid downloads or purely ad-supported apps, AI products have conditioned users to pay monthly fees for continued access in the same way they do for streaming services. Estimates suggest ChatGPT alone has somewhere between 10 and 12 million paying mobile subscribers across its Plus and Pro tiers. That kind of recurring revenue base gives AI app companies a financial profile that looks more like a software-as-a-service business than a traditional consumer app, and investors have taken notice. The productivity app category saw in-app purchase revenue grow 46 percent year over year, with downloads up 17 percent, figures that would have been remarkable for any category in any prior year.
There are also new forces pushing AI app supply upward. Research from Coatue shows that the growth in new apps published to the iOS App Store accelerated from zero percent year over year in February 2025 to 60 percent by December, an inflection point attributed largely to AI coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code enabling developers to build and ship software far faster than before. Platforms like Replit are now allowing creators to describe an app idea, test it on their phones, and publish it to the App Store without traditional development workflows. The supply side of the app economy is expanding rapidly just as demand for AI-powered tools is peaking, creating a feedback loop that Apple and Google are both positioned to benefit from considerably.
In the MENA region, the trends reshaping the global app economy are playing out with particular intensity. In the first half of 2025, ChatGPT ranked third overall by app revenue across the GCC, trailing only TikTok and the regional streaming platform Shahid, while software app in-app purchase revenue across the Gulf Cooperation Council climbed 77 percent year over year, driven largely by AI-powered tools. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt were among the countries that saw over 30 percent growth in non-gaming mobile app installs in 2024, compared to the 7 percent global average, and generative AI app marketers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia increased their user acquisition ad spend by 94 percent year over year. The Gulf's appetite for AI technology is being actively encouraged at the policy level, with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the UAE's national AI strategy both treating AI adoption as a core economic objective. Saudi Arabia's $100 billion Project Transcendence initiative, announced in late 2024, aims to build world-class AI infrastructure, and that foundation is increasingly translating into consumer-level adoption visible in App Store charts. The UAE meanwhile continues to lead the GCC in per-user revenue growth from apps, a reflection of both high smartphone penetration and a consumer base willing to pay for premium digital services.
Whether the App Store's revival is durable depends partly on whether AI apps can sustain the engagement levels they have built so rapidly. Gaming had decades to establish its grip on mobile revenue, and it did so gradually. AI has compressed a comparable revenue story into a couple of years. The fundamental question is whether users who have budgeted for AI the way they budget for Netflix will stay subscribed once the initial novelty fades, or whether continued product improvements, like voice mode, image generation, and agentic features, will keep deepening that habit. Based on 2025's data, the early evidence points toward deepening, not fading. Sessions were growing faster than downloads, which is exactly the behavioral signature of a category that has moved from curiosity to daily utility.
