Demand for generative AI will aid drive consumer spending on apps to $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the previous year. According to the annual “Report on the condition of mobile devices. from application analytics provider Sensor Tower (which acquired Data.ai, the author of the original report, in March last year), interest in AI applications has increased over the past year. This has led to over 200% year-over-year growth in consumer spending on AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, ByteDance’s Doubao and others, bringing total spending in this category to nearly $1.1 billion in 2024.
If this growth rate continues, this app category could be among the top 10 in terms of consumer spending within a year, the company notes.
While the release of novel AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o last summer helped push app revenues to record highs at times, consumer demand for AI applications remained steady throughout the year – not just during peak growth periods. As a result, consumers spent almost 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, and apps mentioning “AI” were also downloaded 17 billion times during the year.
ChatGPT itself has reached 50 million monthly energetic users – for comparison, faster than Temu, Disney+ or YouTube Music.
This means that the appetite for AI applications and those equipped with AI functions continues to grow.
Other app categories that will see traffic in 2024 include streaming, cryptocurrencies, e-commerce and fintech.
Streaming apps saw a slight decline in engagement despite growth in app revenue and downloads.
Crypto apps such as Binance (No. 6) and Tonkeeper (No. 9) ranked among the top 10 financial apps by downloads in 2024. E-commerce apps Temu and Shein were ranked first and second, respectively, in the retail subgenre thanks to expansion in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Meanwhile, financial apps maintained double-digit year-over-year growth throughout 2024, reaching nearly 7.5 billion downloads, up 8% from 2023.
Additionally, Sensor Tower reported that four games and one app are the latest games to reach the milestone of surpassing $1 billion in consumer spending in 2024. These include Last War, Whiteout Survival, Dungeon & Fighter, Brawl Stars and WeTV.
The full report is available on the Sensor Tower website side and includes analysis of iOS and Google Play app stores, but does not include any third-party app stores in other regions, such as China.