Sensor Tower has printed its annual report, providing insights, traits, and knowledge on the worldwide cell app market. Listed below are the primary takeaways.
AI Assistants and Quick Drama noticed the largest development in 2025
Sensor Tower’s State of Cellular 2026 gives a complete have a look at the worldwide cell app market, masking downloads, income, in-app purchases, and different key metrics throughout the App Retailer and Google’s Play Retailer.
The info, which fits way back to January 1, 2014, was compiled by Sensor Tower’s Market Insights group utilizing obtain and income estimates from its App Insights platform.
Within the new report, Sensor Tower says that whereas app downloads remained secure in 2025 in contrast with 2024, “customers spent extra in apps than in video games for the primary time,” echoing a latest discovering by Appfigures. But, in keeping with Sensor Tower, cell video games income rose 1%, regardless of a 7% drop in downloads in contrast with 2024.
Sensor Tower says TikTok topped worldwide app downloads, in-app buy income, and whole time spent in 2025. In the meantime, ChatGPT surged 148% in downloads, 254% in IAP income, and a whopping 426% in whole time spent, serving to it bounce to second place in Sensor Tower’s international high 20 apps by downloads.
Unsurprisingly, this additionally meant that ChatGPT was the highest AI app obtain for the yr, adopted by Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Doubao, Perplexity, Grok, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Seekee, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot.
And talking of TikTok, Sensor Tower says that “customers spent practically 2.5 trillion hours on social media apps,” which accounted for “greater than 90 minutes per day for the common cell person”. That was a 5% enhance in comparison with final yr’s report.
The report additionally says that AI assistants ranked because the Tenth-largest app class by whole time spent, with a 426% year-over-year surge. Apparently, an surprising class surged alongside AI Assistants as a breakout subgenre:
AI Assistants and Quick Drama emerged as breakout subgenres throughout key cell metrics in 2025, rating among the many high three by development in downloads and IAP income. Social Media stays the unequalled chief in absolute time spent will increase attributable to its huge scale, although it delivered far decrease development on a proportion foundation. Scroll via the completely different markets to see the place AI Assistants are gaining traction the quickest and which areas should current alternatives for development.
Again to ChatGPT, it turned the ninth most used app for males within the US throughout This autumn 2025, whereas Pinterest, TikTok, and Vemo appeared “completely within the high 10 for ladies”.
High downloaded apps for every class
And talking of rankings, these had been essentially the most downloaded apps worldwide, in every class explored by Sensor Tower’s State of Cellular 2026:
To be taught extra about Sensor Tower’s State of Cellular 2026, observe this hyperlink.
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