Demand for generative AI help drive consumer spending on apps to $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year. According to an annual “State of Mobile” report from app intelligence provider Sensor Tower (which acquired Data.ai, the original report’s author, last March), AI apps saw a surge of interest over the past year. This led to an over 200% increase year-over-year in consumer spending in AI apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, ByteDance’s Doubao, and others, bringing the total spent in the category to nearly $1.1 billion in 2024.
If this rate of growth is sustained, this category of apps could move into the top 10 by consumer spending within a year, the firm notes.
Though the release of new AI models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o last summer, helped drive app revenue up to record numbers at times, consumer demand for AI apps was consistent throughout the year — not only during these peak surges. As a result, consumers spent nearly 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, while apps mentioning “AI” were also downloaded 17 billion times in the year.
ChatGPT alone reached 50 million monthly active users — faster than Temu, Disney+, or YouTube Music, for comparison.
This indicates there’s still a growing appetite for AI apps and those with AI features.
Other app categories seeing movement in 2024 included streaming, crypto, e-commerce, and fintech.
Streaming apps saw a slight decline in engagement, despite growth in in-app revenue and downloads.
Crypto apps like Binance (No. 6) and Tonkeeper (No. 9) moved into the top 10 finance apps by downloads in 2024. E-commerce apps Temu and Shein ranked as the No. 1 and No. 2 apps, respectively, in the retail subgenre, thanks to expansions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Meanwhile, finance apps retained double-digit year-over-year growth for time spent in 2024 and neared 7.5 billion downloads, up 8% from 2023.
In addition, Sensor Tower said that four games and one app became the latest to reach the milestone of passing $1 billion in consumer spending in 2024. These included Last War, Whiteout Survival, Dungeon & Fighter, Brawl Stars, and WeTV.
The full report is available on Sensor Tower’s site and includes an analysis of the iOS App Store and Google Play, but not any of the third-party app stores in other regions, like China.
