SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- Demand for generative artificial intelligence (AI) helps drive consumer spending on apps to 150 billion U.S. dollars globally in 2024, up 13 percent from the prior year, according to an annual "State of Mobile" report newly released by app intelligence provider Sensor Tower.
AI apps saw a surge of interest over the past year. This led to an over 200 percent year-over-year increase 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 dollars in 2024, the report said.
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.
Meanwhile, finance apps retained double-digit year-over-year growth for time spent in 2024 and neared 7.5 billion downloads, up 8 percent from 2023, the report said.
E-commerce apps Temu and Shein ranked as the No. 1 and No. 2 apps, respectively, in the retail subgenre, thanks to their expansions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
The study includes the analysis of the iOS App Store and Google Play, but not any of the third-party app stores in other regions, according to Sensor Tower.
