Sensor Tower has published its annual report, offering insights, trends, and data on the global mobile app market. Here are the main takeaways.

AI Assistants and Short Drama saw the biggest growth in 2025

Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 offers a comprehensive look at the global mobile app market, covering downloads, revenue, in-app purchases, and other key metrics across the App Store and Google’s Play Store.

The data, which goes as far back as January 1, 2014, was compiled by Sensor Tower’s Market Insights team using download and revenue estimates from its App Insights platform.

In the new report, Sensor Tower says that while app downloads remained stable in 2025 compared with 2024, “consumers spent more in apps than in games for the first time,” echoing a recent finding by Appfigures. Yet, according to Sensor Tower, mobile games revenue rose 1%, despite a 7% drop in downloads compared with 2024.

Sensor Tower says TikTok topped worldwide app downloads, in-app purchase revenue, and total time spent in 2025. Meanwhile, ChatGPT surged 148% in downloads, 254% in IAP revenue, and a whopping 426% in total time spent, helping it jump to second place in Sensor Tower’s global top 20 apps by downloads.

Unsurprisingly, this also meant that ChatGPT was the top AI app download for the year, followed by Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Doubao, Perplexity, Grok, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Seekee, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot.

And speaking of TikTok, Sensor Tower says that “consumers spent nearly 2.5 trillion hours on social media apps,” which accounted for “more than 90 minutes per day for the average mobile user”. That was a 5% increase compared to last year’s report.

The report also says that AI assistants ranked as the 10th-largest app category by total time spent, with a 426% year-over-year surge. Interestingly, an unexpected category surged alongside AI Assistants as a breakout subgenre:

AI Assistants and Short Drama emerged as breakout subgenres across key mobile metrics in 2025, ranking among the top three by growth in downloads and IAP revenue. Social Media remains the unrivaled leader in absolute time spent increases due to its massive scale, though it delivered far lower growth on a percentage basis. Scroll through the different markets to see where AI Assistants are gaining traction the fastest and which regions may still present opportunities for growth.

Back to ChatGPT, it became the 9th most used app for men in the US during Q4 2025, while Pinterest, TikTok, and Vemo appeared “exclusively in the top 10 for women”.

Top downloaded apps for each category

And speaking of rankings, these were the most downloaded apps worldwide, in each category explored by Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026:

To learn more about Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026, follow this link.

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