India witnesses 16% of total global downloads of Gen AI apps in 2025

India emerged as a global hotspot for AI apps in 2025, accounting for 16% of worldwide downloads, though revenue contribution remains under 1%, a Sensor Tower report shows

India saw 16 per cent of total global downloads of 3.8 billion generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications in 2025, according to a report ‘State of Mobile’ for 2026 released on Wednesday by Sensor Tower. Indian users downloaded 0.6 billion AI apps last year. 

The numbers represent a sharp increase in India’s share of total downloads across the globe, which was pegged at 11.31 per cent in 2024 and only 10 per cent in 2023. 

However, India accounted for a mere less than 1 per cent of the total in-app purchase (IAP) revenues generated by AI apps globally. This reflects that most users and app companies have been offering the service free to users.

AI app companies globally generated revenues of $5 billion last year. India's share of General AI app revenues even in 2024 was less than 1 per cent. 

The huge growth is reflected in the fact that the number of downloads by users in India in 2025 went up by a staggering 204 per cent over the previous year. 

Even the revenues earned by apps went up in 2025 in India by 240 per cent in the same period — but the base is still very small. In terms of time spent, Generative AI app users in India spent a substantial 6 billion hours last year on these, accounting for 12.6 per cent of the total time spent globally on these apps — the total being 48 billion hours.    

Moreover, the number of sessions on the Gen AI app by consumers in India hit 178 billion, accounting for 13.8 per cent of the total global sessions (of 1.2 trillion).           

The top apps in terms of downloads in the General AI space from India was clearly ChatGPT followed by Google Gemini, Perplexity and Grok from Elon Musk. Chinese Deepseek is far behind at number eight. 

Globally, however, the top two publishers — ChatGPT and Deepseek — accounted for 50 per cent of the total downloads in this category, up from 21 per cent in 2023. 

Big tech publishers have also seen their share go up from 14 per cent in 2023 to 30 per cent in 2025.  

As a result, many of the older competitors are being crowded out, leaving only 25 per cent of downloads for the remaining top 25 apps. 

Many takers

 

• Users in India downloaded 0.6 bn generative AI apps in 2025, a growth of over 204% over the previous year
• However, they paid only $48 mn in revenues to app publishers
• Indians spent 6 bn hours on these apps last year
• ChatGPT and Google Gemini were the top 2 downloaded apps in India; Deepseek ranked at 8