According to a report, the global mobile ecosystem achieved record highs across all core metrics in 2025, driven by the dual forces of generative AI and commercial opportunities. Data from Sensor Tower's "2026 Mobile Market Report" reveals that worldwide app downloads, user engagement time, and in-app purchase revenue all climbed to new peaks. Notably, global in-app purchase revenue grew by 10.6% year-over-year to reach $167 billion, signaling the mobile market's full entry into a new development phase centered on monetization.
The attention economy has become the focal point. As mobile app stores enter their 18th year, the overall market has matured yet remains highly active. The industry's growth focus is shifting from user acquisition and engagement towards monetization efficiency—leading applications are driving the market into a new developmental stage through increasingly diverse business models. Concurrently, opportunities for user reach and deep engagement remain open: global downloads on the App Store and Google Play saw a slight increase of 0.8% in 2025, approaching 150 billion, once again breaking historical records.
Mobile user engagement time continues to climb steadily. In 2025, the total time consumers spent on App Store and Google Play applications reached 5.3 trillion hours (a 3.8% year-over-year increase), equating to an average of approximately 3.6 hours of daily usage per mobile user. In most mature markets, while the growth in downloads and usage time has moderated, revenue continues to rise, further intensifying the competition for users' finite attention across various app categories.
In 2025, the total revenue from in-app purchases and paid applications on the App Store and Google Play platforms reached $167 billion, a 10.6% increase year-over-year. For the first time, non-game applications surpassed games in in-app purchase revenue, becoming the primary growth driver—their IAP revenue grew by 21% year-over-year, nearly tripling in size compared to five years ago. In contrast, game revenue growth was more modest, with a 1.3% annual increase.
The mobile market is highly globalized, yet localized insights are becoming the key to success. Despite the increasing global interconnectivity of the mobile ecosystem, significant differences in competitive landscapes, tariff policies, and regulatory environments across countries make deep understanding of local markets crucial. In 2025, the United States remained the world's largest mobile revenue market, with consumer spending approaching $60 billion. Western European markets also contributed significantly to global growth, with the United Kingdom, Germany, and France performing particularly well.
Meanwhile, user engagement trends showed clear divergence across regions. In 2025, user engagement time in the U.S. market grew by 4% year-over-year, showing a moderate recovery after signs of digital fatigue in 2024. As monetization opportunities continue to broaden and AI technology optimizes user experiences, the competitive landscape for capturing user attention across different app categories is expected to remain intense in 2026.
The gaming industry's transformation path: from scale expansion to efficiency deepening. In 2025, the gaming industry experienced its third consecutive year of revenue growth, with in-app purchase revenue nearing $82 billion (a 1.3% year-over-year increase). The market has gradually moved past the post-pandemic correction phase following the 2021 highs and entered a new cycle of stable development. Although downloads continued to contract, user engagement time saw a slight rebound, indicating that industry growth is shifting from user base expansion to deep mining of the value of existing users.
User engagement levels varied significantly across regional markets: engagement time rebounded in the U.S. and Japanese markets after a decline in 2024, while it decreased in Mainland China. In Europe, the UK showed stronger performance, France remained stable, and Germany exhibited a weakening trend. As new installations narrow, industry growth is becoming less correlated with new user numbers and significantly more linked to deepening the value of existing users—retention capabilities, payment structures, and monetization efficiency are now key drivers of growth.
Major players enter the arena, AI competition enters a new phase of scaled growth. In 2025, generative AI applications maintained strong growth momentum on a high base, with both download and in-app purchase revenue growth rates surpassing the already high levels of 2024. Annual downloads more than doubled year-over-year, reaching 3.8 billion; in-app purchase revenue approached $5 billion, nearly tripling compared to the previous year. Tech giants like Alphabet, Microsoft, and X continued to increase investments in AI assistants, actively catching up with market leaders such as ChatGPT in functional innovation and scenario expansion, collectively accelerating the evolution of the competitive landscape.
From a user engagement perspective, mobile users have moved beyond the early experimentation phase with AI applications and have begun integrating them into daily high-frequency usage scenarios. In 2025, the cumulative usage time of generative AI applications reached 48 billion hours, approximately 3.6 times the 2024 level and nearly ten times the 2023 figure. User session volume also showed synchronized high growth, exceeding 1 trillion sessions for the year. Notably, the growth rate of sessions continued to outpace the growth rate of downloads, further indicating that the growth logic of the generative AI application industry has shifted from pursuing user scale expansion to continuously deepening the usage depth and engagement frequency of existing users.