Demand for generative AI will help drive global consumer spending on apps to $150 billion in 2024, up 13% from the previous year. According to the annual "State of Mobile" report released by application intelligence provider SensorTower (the company acquired the original report author Data.ai in March last year), artificial intelligence applications have received widespread attention in the past year.
This has resulted in consumer spending on AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, ByteDance’s Beanbao and other AI applications increasing by more than 200% year-on-year, with total spending in this category reaching nearly $1.1 billion by 2024. The company pointed out that if this growth rate can be maintained, consumer spending on such applications will enter the top ten within a year.
While the release of new AI models (like OpenAI's GPT-4o last summer) sometimes helps drive app revenue to record levels, consumer demand for AI apps continues to grow throughout the year, not just during these peak periods. As a result, consumers will spend nearly 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, and apps mentioning "artificial intelligence" will be downloaded 17 billion times during the year.
ChatGPT alone has 50 million monthly active users - by comparison, it's faster than Temu, Disney+ or YouTube Music. This shows that the demand for artificial intelligence applications and applications with artificial intelligence capabilities is still growing.
Other application categories seeing movement in 2024 include streaming, cryptocurrency, e-commerce and fintech. Streaming apps saw a slight decline in engagement, despite growth in in-app revenue and downloads.
Cryptocurrency apps such as Binance (No. 6) and Tonkeeper (No. 9) have entered the top ten most downloaded financial apps in 2024. E-commerce apps Temu and Shein emerged as the number one and number two retail sub-genre apps, respectively, due to expansion in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Meanwhile, financial apps maintained double-digit year-over-year growth in time spent in 2024, with nearly 7.5 billion downloads, an 8% increase from 2023.
In addition, SensorTower said that four games and one app reached the milestone of exceeding $1 billion in consumer spending in 2024. These games include Last War, Whiteout Survival, Dungeon & Fighter, BrawlStars and WeTV.
The full report, which is available on SensorTower's website, includes analysis of the iOS App Store and Google Play, but does not include analysis of third-party app stores in other regions such as China.