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Consumers spent more on mobile apps than games in 2025, driven by AI app adoption | TechCrunch

Consumers spent more on mobile apps than games in 2025, driven by AI app adoption | TechCrunch

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In 2025, consumers spent more money on non-game mobile apps than they did on games for the first time, according to the findings from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s annual “State of Mobile” report. While this milestone had been seen in particular markets, like the U.S., or during certain quarters, 2025 marked the first time it occurred globally. Worldwide, consumers spent approximately $85 billion on apps last year, representing a 21% year-over-year increase. The figure was also nearly 2.8x the amount spent just five years ago.

Image Credits:Sensor Tower

Generative AI, a defining trend over the past year, led the revenue growth, as in-app purchase revenue in this category more than tripled to top $5 billion in 2025. Downloads of AI apps also grew, doubling year-over-year to reach 3.8 billion.

Image Credits:Sensor Tower

The segment’s growth can be attributed to several factors. For one, the popularity of AI assistants among consumers was a large driver, with all of the top 10 apps by downloads being AI assistants. This group was led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. ChatGPT alone generated $3.4 billion in global in-app purchase (IAP) revenue — a figure that we reported on late last year.

Image Credits:Sensor Tower

In 2025, consumers spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps, or 3.6x the total time spent in 2024 and 10x the level seen in 2023. Session volume, meaning the number of times users opened and used an app, topped one trillion in 2025. Of note, this figure was growing faster than downloads, suggesting that existing users were deepening their engagement faster than the apps were adding new users.

Image Credits:Sensor Tower

Another factor driving AI app revenue and adoption is that big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and X have been heavily investing in their AI assistants to challenge ChatGPT. Over the past year, they’ve been rolling out new capabilities at a rapid pace, improving in areas like coding assistance, content generation, reasoning, task execution, accuracy, and more. The report specifically called out improvements in image and video generation, like ChatGPT’s GPT-4o image generation model released in March, and Google’s Nano Banana.

Among the top AI publishers, OpenAI and DeepSeek accounted for nearly 50% of global downloads, up from 21% in 2024. Meanwhile, big tech publishers grew their share of the market from 14% to nearly 30% during this same time, crowding out earlier ChatGPT competitors like Nova, Codeway, and Chat Smith.

Image Credits:Sensor Tower

The report also highlighted the role that mobile plays in connecting users to generative AI services. Sensor Tower estimates that the total audience for AI assistants topped 200 million in the U.S. by year-end, and more than half (110M) were accessing the assistants exclusively on mobile devices. In 2024, for comparison, only around 13 million users were mobile-only.

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Beyond assistants, other popular AI apps included the AI music generation app Suno; ByteDance’s text-to-video app, Jimeng AI; and AI companion apps like Character.ai and PolyBuzz.

Mobile apps topped games in consumer spending in 2025, driven by AI revenue.
Image Credits:Sensor Tower

However, AI wasn’t the only revenue driver last year, Sensor Tower found. Other apps, including those in categories like social media, video streaming, and productivity, also helped fuel the growth, the report noted. For instance, consumers spent an average of 90 minutes per day on social media apps, totaling nearly 2.5 trillion hours, up 5% year-over-year.

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The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI researchers are up to: log on to X.

In the past year, I’ve seen a steady increase of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers joining X and participating in the wider discourse about AI development and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3, as an example. On Thursday, I was able to quickly find around 30 accounts on X run by people who claim to be currently affiliated with Moonshot, including two of the startup’s cofounders, as well as half a dozen former employees and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They talk about Moonshot’s big releases and incremental research papers, make friends with Western researchers, and share details about their personal life and hobbies.

Moonshot is arguably the Chinese AI lab that’s most active on X, but you will easily find executives and technical staff from other leading Chinese startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even several employees at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to leave China because the government confiscated their passports, regularly post on X about the latest AI news and share job listings to recruit new talent.

“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, where he worked on the Kimi K2.5 model. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with Chinese platforms, where it’s often hard to have serious technical discussions, Chinese researchers like Meng say they would rather spend their time on X.

Meng says he started actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the start of the year, DeepSeek’s R1 model went viral around the world, shining a bright spotlight on China’s AI industry. Many Chinese researchers seized the moment and joined X to start sharing their perspective. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.

Chinese AI researchers may also be helping fill a growing gap left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their employers have grown into behemoth companies, says Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they’re posting less,” Wang explains. As a result, Chinese researchers are getting more attention from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s happening in the fast-moving world of AI.

Why Choose X?

One reason X may have become popular among Chinese AI researchers is that there’s not really a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.

Some people say they used to post on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals to show and tell. But since 2020, Zhihu has increasingly pivoted to hosting fiction content, and expert contributors have gradually fallen off. For example, Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting on the site due to the rise of low-quality content.

#Chinese #Researchers #Finding #Voicemade in china,china,artificial intelligence,x,twitter,rednote,deepseek">Chinese AI Researchers Are Finding Their Voice on XThe prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI researchers are up to: log on to X.In the past year, I’ve seen a steady increase of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers joining X and participating in the wider discourse about AI development and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3, as an example. On Thursday, I was able to quickly find around 30 accounts on X run by people who claim to be currently affiliated with Moonshot, including two of the startup’s cofounders, as well as half a dozen former employees and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They talk about Moonshot’s big releases and incremental research papers, make friends with Western researchers, and share details about their personal life and hobbies.Moonshot is arguably the Chinese AI lab that’s most active on X, but you will easily find executives and technical staff from other leading Chinese startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even several employees at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to leave China because the government confiscated their passports, regularly post on X about the latest AI news and share job listings to recruit new talent.“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, where he worked on the Kimi K2.5 model. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with Chinese platforms, where it’s often hard to have serious technical discussions, Chinese researchers like Meng say they would rather spend their time on X.Meng says he started actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the start of the year, DeepSeek’s R1 model went viral around the world, shining a bright spotlight on China’s AI industry. Many Chinese researchers seized the moment and joined X to start sharing their perspective. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.Chinese AI researchers may also be helping fill a growing gap left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their employers have grown into behemoth companies, says Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they’re posting less,” Wang explains. As a result, Chinese researchers are getting more attention from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s happening in the fast-moving world of AI.Why Choose X?One reason X may have become popular among Chinese AI researchers is that there’s not really a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.Some people say they used to post on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals to show and tell. But since 2020, Zhihu has increasingly pivoted to hosting fiction content, and expert contributors have gradually fallen off. For example, Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting on the site due to the rise of low-quality content.#Chinese #Researchers #Finding #Voicemade in china,china,artificial intelligence,x,twitter,rednote,deepseek

Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI researchers are up to: log on to X.

In the past year, I’ve seen a steady increase of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers joining X and participating in the wider discourse about AI development and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3, as an example. On Thursday, I was able to quickly find around 30 accounts on X run by people who claim to be currently affiliated with Moonshot, including two of the startup’s cofounders, as well as half a dozen former employees and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They talk about Moonshot’s big releases and incremental research papers, make friends with Western researchers, and share details about their personal life and hobbies.

Moonshot is arguably the Chinese AI lab that’s most active on X, but you will easily find executives and technical staff from other leading Chinese startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even several employees at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to leave China because the government confiscated their passports, regularly post on X about the latest AI news and share job listings to recruit new talent.

“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, where he worked on the Kimi K2.5 model. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with Chinese platforms, where it’s often hard to have serious technical discussions, Chinese researchers like Meng say they would rather spend their time on X.

Meng says he started actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the start of the year, DeepSeek’s R1 model went viral around the world, shining a bright spotlight on China’s AI industry. Many Chinese researchers seized the moment and joined X to start sharing their perspective. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.

Chinese AI researchers may also be helping fill a growing gap left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their employers have grown into behemoth companies, says Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they’re posting less,” Wang explains. As a result, Chinese researchers are getting more attention from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s happening in the fast-moving world of AI.

Why Choose X?

One reason X may have become popular among Chinese AI researchers is that there’s not really a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.

Some people say they used to post on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals to show and tell. But since 2020, Zhihu has increasingly pivoted to hosting fiction content, and expert contributors have gradually fallen off. For example, Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting on the site due to the rise of low-quality content.

#Chinese #Researchers #Finding #Voicemade in china,china,artificial intelligence,x,twitter,rednote,deepseek">Chinese AI Researchers Are Finding Their Voice on X

The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI researchers are up to: log on to X.

In the past year, I’ve seen a steady increase of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers joining X and participating in the wider discourse about AI development and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3, as an example. On Thursday, I was able to quickly find around 30 accounts on X run by people who claim to be currently affiliated with Moonshot, including two of the startup’s cofounders, as well as half a dozen former employees and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They talk about Moonshot’s big releases and incremental research papers, make friends with Western researchers, and share details about their personal life and hobbies.

Moonshot is arguably the Chinese AI lab that’s most active on X, but you will easily find executives and technical staff from other leading Chinese startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even several employees at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to leave China because the government confiscated their passports, regularly post on X about the latest AI news and share job listings to recruit new talent.

“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, where he worked on the Kimi K2.5 model. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with Chinese platforms, where it’s often hard to have serious technical discussions, Chinese researchers like Meng say they would rather spend their time on X.

Meng says he started actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the start of the year, DeepSeek’s R1 model went viral around the world, shining a bright spotlight on China’s AI industry. Many Chinese researchers seized the moment and joined X to start sharing their perspective. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.

Chinese AI researchers may also be helping fill a growing gap left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their employers have grown into behemoth companies, says Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they’re posting less,” Wang explains. As a result, Chinese researchers are getting more attention from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s happening in the fast-moving world of AI.

Why Choose X?

One reason X may have become popular among Chinese AI researchers is that there’s not really a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.

Some people say they used to post on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals to show and tell. But since 2020, Zhihu has increasingly pivoted to hosting fiction content, and expert contributors have gradually fallen off. For example, Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting on the site due to the rise of low-quality content.

#Chinese #Researchers #Finding #Voicemade in china,china,artificial intelligence,x,twitter,rednote,deepseek

If your T-Mobile service was disrupted on Monday, you may be able to get some compensation for your troubles.

Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.

SEE ALSO: T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to qualify

Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.

After a major Verizon mobile outage in January, Verizon offered all affected customers a $20 credit.

Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.

Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.

#TMobile #outage #credit #bill">T-Mobile outage: You might be able to get credit on your bill If your T-Mobile service was disrupted on Monday, you may be able to get some compensation for your troubles.Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage. SEE ALSO: T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to qualify Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles. Mashable Light Speed After a major Verizon mobile outage in January, Verizon offered all affected customers a credit.Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of .7 billion. #TMobile #outage #credit #bill

T-Mobile service was disrupted on Monday, you may be able to get some compensation for your troubles.

Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.

SEE ALSO: T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to qualify

Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.

After a major Verizon mobile outage in January, Verizon offered all affected customers a $20 credit.

Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.

Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.

#TMobile #outage #credit #bill">T-Mobile outage: You might be able to get credit on your bill

If your T-Mobile service was disrupted on Monday, you may be able to get some compensation for your troubles.

Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.

SEE ALSO: T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to qualify

Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.

After a major Verizon mobile outage in January, Verizon offered all affected customers a $20 credit.

Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.

Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.

#TMobile #outage #credit #bill

The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?

After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.

#time #panic #safetyAI,OpenAI,Podcasts,Policy,Vergecast">It’s time to panic about AI safetyWhen the phrase “OpenAI hacked Hugging Face” has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI’s agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.#time #panic #safetyAI,OpenAI,Podcasts,Policy,Vergecast

we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI’s agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.

The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?

After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.

#time #panic #safetyAI,OpenAI,Podcasts,Policy,Vergecast">It’s time to panic about AI safety

When the phrase “OpenAI hacked Hugging Face” has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI’s agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.

The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?

After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.

#time #panic #safetyAI,OpenAI,Podcasts,Policy,Vergecast

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