2025's most-downloaded iPhone app is, you guessed it, ChatGPT

GenAI and social media dominate Apple's end-of-year list

by · TechSpot

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In context: ChatGPT's extreme popularity makes its position as 2025's most downloaded iOS app unsurprising. Amid controversy, the service has hundreds of millions of users, including a large portion of US teens. However, Google's rival chatbot is gaining ground, and ChatGPT's commercial success remains far from certain.

Apple has released a list of the App Store's most downloaded free apps, with OpenAI's ChatGPT predictably at the top. "The GenAI chatbot has seen tremendous growth since its introduction, which helped launch the ongoing AI craze.

With over 800 million weekly users, ChatGPT has quadrupled its user base over the past year and added over 300 million users since March. ChatGPT processes nearly 30,000 messages per second, and most adults use it to find information, effectively replacing traditional search engines. Meanwhile, almost one-third of US teenagers use chatbots daily, 59 percent of whom use ChatGPT.

Google, concerned that OpenAI's chatbot could replace its search engine, has rapidly developed its rival, Gemini, integrating it into its web browser and other products. Although AI-generated summaries and other features have reduced traffic from Google searches, the company believes that disrupting a status quo beneficial to itself is worth avoiding the risk of Blockbuster's fate.

Although Gemini barely made it into Apple's top 10 apps (tellingly, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search rank higher), its usage and feature set have grown enough to frighten OpenAI. The ChatGPT developer recently declared a "code red," shifting focus from introducing new features to enhancing performance and reliability.

Google's rapid GenAI development likely stems from its existing businesses, putting it on much firmer financial ground than OpenAI – a private company that still relies on fundraising. Despite planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years, OpenAI does not plan to become profitable until at least 2029.

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The situation has sparked widespread discussion of an AI bubble, as the technology has not generated profits for most businesses, and related investments have singlehandedly upheld the US economy. Furthermore, questions about GenAI's effectiveness have not diminished, as chatbots and large language models continue to prove inaccurate and even harmful.

Notably, Copilot is absent from Apple's top 20 apps, suggesting that the billions Microsoft has invested in GenAI have not paid off. Indeed, no Microsoft apps appear on the list, the rest of which is a mostly predictable collection of social media apps.

TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube sit in the top 10, maintaining their ubiquity, while Facebook falls just short at rank 11. Surprisingly, Threads ranks second despite receiving less attention than Twitter and Bluesky, neither of which appears in the top 20. Another standout is the free video editor CapCut, ranked 12th, which is also available on Android, Windows, and macOS.