Why AI Leaders Are So Focused On Image Generation

The amount of time people spend using AI apps hasn’t doubled over the past few years. It hasn’t tripled. It’s increased tenfold. Users spent more than 48 billion hours engaging with AI-powered applications in 2025, and the rate of growth just keeps increasing. Keep reading as we unpack key AI insights from Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 — including engagement patterns, top subgenres, and the real reason AI leaders are so focused on image generation. 

Acquisition and Engagement in AI Apps: Sessions vs. Downloads

We know time spent in AI apps is growing (+259% YoY), but what about user acquisition? Downloads hit 3.8 billion in 2025, more than doubling 2024 levels. Interestingly, session volume grew faster, climbing 256% to exceed one trillion sessions worldwide. Sessions’ higher rate of growth compared to downloads means that pre-existing users have increased the frequency with which they engage faster than new users have made the decision to install. In other words? Brands are leaning into deepened engagement with existing audiences, eschewing a narrow focus on raw acquisition. 

That’s not to say that acquisition isn’t a priority, though (case in point: Anthropic’s Superbowl ad). And so far, one category is the clear acquisition leader. The most popular subgenre by yards and miles is AI Assistants. These Gen AI chatbots dominate the downloads charts, with the ten most-downloaded AI apps in 2025 all falling in the Assistants category. The next most-downloaded subgenre is AI Content Generation — which brings us to the unique importance of image and video generation tools for success. 

Image and Video Generation Gives Top AI Apps A Performance Boost

AI leaders are in a race to perfect their content creation abilities, in part because these features tend to lead to concrete boosts in new user acquisition. ChatGPT and Google Gemini, for instance, both saw sharp increases in weekly global downloads following the respective rollouts of their image and video generation tools. The companies’ effective launch strategies no doubt aided this performance bump, as aggressive App Store Optimization and advertising efforts supported the releases. New content generation abilities featured prominently in App Store descriptions, screenshots, and custom product pages. Gemini was particularly voracious in boosting spend during the rollout of its nano-banana model, increasing budget dramatically on networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. 

As AI Assistants continue to expand their purview, the dividing line between various AI subgenres may blur, as models like ChatGPT and Deepseek fashion themselves into one-stop-shops for consumers’ Generative AI needs.  In the full State of Mobile 2026 report, we dive even deeper into these trends, looking at mobile’s crucial role in accelerating downloads, the split between big tech and AI-native publishers, and more exclusive insights on Gen AI’s transformative role in the digital economy. Download it here.