AI Apps – 2024 Review

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, 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.