Led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, overall spending on AI apps jumped to $1.42 billion in 2024, according to app analytics firm Appfigures. This marks a 274% increase from 2023 (the app launched in May of that year). Among tens of thousands of competitor apps — some of which license OpenAI’s own technology — ChatGPT is so dominant that it has consistently earned more than the aggregate revenue of other top AI assistant apps.
The success of these apps is also a boon for Apple and Google, which retain about 30% of revenue from in-app purchases. Overall, mobile AI apps constitute a $2 billion market, according to Appfigures.
ChatGPT has been downloaded 353 million times to date, but the demographics that use the app are skewed. Over half of ChatGPT’s mobile users are under age 25, indicating that perhaps young people are more open to experimenting with new technology (or, maybe, these users just want help with their homework — the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of U.S. teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork, which has doubled from 2023).
However, users between ages 50 and 64 make up the second largest age demographic, with 20.2% of users.
The gender gap among ChatGPT users is even more significant. Appfigures estimates that across age groups, men make up 84.5% of all users.
Though women hold prominent roles in the AI industry, a Pew report from 2022 indicates that women tend to be more skeptical about AI than men; an Axios poll found that 53% of women surveyed would not allow their children to use AI at all, as opposed to 26% of men. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that women will be more likely to lose their jobs to automation than their male counterparts, which could drive further resistance.
Women might also be less enthusiastic about the mass adoption of consumer AI products because they are particularly vulnerable to the most sinister impacts of this technology, like sexually explicit deepfake images.
ChatGPT is solidly winning the lion’s share of AI app spending, but with DeepSeek coming on the market as a free, open source alternative, the OpenAI app may see slight headwinds. DeepSeek has already dethroned OpenAI as the top app in the App Store, but maintaining its current level of hype could be a challenge for the Chinese AI app.
Source: TechCrunch
