Average daily phone time hit 3.6 hours in 2025, up 3.8% from the year before. Sensor Tower put those numbers out in their State of Mobile 2026 report. The growth didn’t come from social media. Not from games either. AI apps. Generative AI apps logged 48 billion hours of total usage in 2025. That’s 3.6 times more than 2024 and nearly ten times what they did in 2023. If you’ve noticed your own habits shifting on platforms like 1xbet app Bahrain or any other mobile service, the same thing is happening everywhere. Three years ago these AI tools didn’t exist. Now they’re eating into the same hours that every other app on your phone needs.
ChatGPT Is Eating Into Everyone’s Screen Time
900 million weekly active users as of early 2026. Time spent in the app jumped 426% during 2025. Downloads up 148%. In-app purchase revenue up 254%. The average user opens ChatGPT 2 to 3 times a day, spends about 12 minutes per session, and ends up logging 24 to 37 minutes daily. Instagram sits at 33 to 42. Snapchat around 30. So ChatGPT is already in that range, and it’s been around for barely three years.
It’s not scrolling though. People come in with a job to do. Write something, look something up, debug some code. 72% of traffic comes from desktop, so most of the heavy use is work stuff. The mobile side is catching up fast though, especially after voice mode turned the app into something you talk to instead of type into.
59% of teens use it now. Pew Research published that number in late 2025. More than Discord. More than Reddit. Three years ago, most of these teens had never interacted with an AI tool outside of a voice assistant on their phone. Now over half of them use ChatGPT regularly enough to show up in survey data. Zero to mainstream in three years.
| App | Daily Time Per User | Primary Use |
| 33-42 min | Social, content | |
| ChatGPT | 24-37 min | Tasks, search, writing |
| Snapchat | 30 min | Messaging, stories |
| TikTok | 45+ min | Entertainment, short video |
AI Apps Are Adding Screen Time, Not Replacing It
ChatGPT didn’t steal minutes from Instagram or TikTok. People are adding AI sessions on top of what they already do. The 3.6 hours per day figure includes AI usage that didn’t exist before November 2022, when ChatGPT launched and hit one million users in five days. Total screen time went up, not sideways. Your phone time in 2025 was longer than your phone time in 2024, and a chunk of that extra time went straight to AI tools.
Session volume for Gen AI apps crossed one trillion in 2025. Not downloads. Sessions. People are opening these apps daily, not installing them and walking away. And sessions are growing faster than downloads, so the existing users are coming back more often.
Sensor Tower projects Gen AI will crack the top five app categories globally before the end of 2026. ChatGPT already hit one billion downloads faster than any app in history and sat at #2 in global in-app purchase revenue by Q3 2025, behind TikTok. One market generated $275 million in mobile revenue in a single month, March 2026.
35% of new apps released in 2025 had some kind of AI feature baked in. AI tutors, photo editors, productivity tools. Even apps that have nothing to do with AI started adding chatbot features or smart suggestions because the market data said that’s what keeps people opening the app. Gen AI is projected to pass Dating and Financial Services to become #3 in in-app purchase revenue by year-end. You can also 1xbet download mobile apps for sports and entertainment tracking from most platforms now. The phone became the default for basically everything.
Social Media Still Leads but the Gap Is Closing
Social media still takes the biggest slice of daily phone time, and games pull in 60% of App Store revenue at over $82 billion. Entertainment is second at 32.7% of usage. None of those numbers collapsed.
But downloads for social and entertainment apps are basically flat year on year. AI apps? 148% download growth and 254% revenue growth in the same window. If you’re a developer building a social media app right now, you’re competing for the same screen hours as ChatGPT. That wasn’t true two years ago.
Global in-app purchase revenue hit $167 billion in 2025, up 10.6%. Most of it still goes to games and social. The growth, though, is coming from somewhere else entirely.
