So ChatGPT pulled 770 million downloads in 2025 and crossed a billion by July. A billion. For a text box. Not a game, not a streaming service, not something with video or music or characters. A chat window where you type questions and it types back. Fastest any app has ever reached that number, and it was not even close to anything before it.
That one data point messed up a lot of the assumptions about what “entertainment on a phone” even means anymore.
Sensor Tower dropped their State of Mobile 2026 report and buried in it was a line that caught attention across the industry. For the first time ever, people spent more money on non-game apps than on games. Games held the revenue crown for the entire history of app stores. Every single year since the App Store launched in 2008. Until 2025, when AI tools plus streaming subscriptions plus social media purchases collectively overtook them.
Worth sitting with that for a second because it changes what every category breakdown below actually means.
Streaming Is Not the Netflix Show Anymore
AppTweak counted entertainment app downloads across both stores for 2025 and the numbers surprised a few people who assumed Netflix was still running away with the category.
- Netflix – 415.6M downloads, still first, but down 11.5% from the previous year
- DramaBox – 374.1M downloads, up 123%
- ReelShort – 337.5M downloads, up 192.8%
Hold on, DramaBox and ReelShort? Both are short-form vertical drama apps. Chinese-backed production. Serialized stories shot in portrait orientation, episodes running one to three minutes, designed to be swiped through the same way you swipe TikTok. Both blew up globally in 2025 and most Western media outlets barely covered it happening.
AppTweak noticed something about how content gets discovered inside these apps too. Gone are the carousels and genre menus. Instead you get full-screen swipeable feeds where a clip grabs you and you tap to watch the rest. Social media trained that behaviour and now scripted television has adopted it. Portrait mode. Short bursts. Swipe for more.
Netflix is still enormous at 415 million installs. Nobody is writing an obituary. But the growth has moved to a format Netflix was not built for and is still figuring out how to chase.
Do you know YouTube has more paid subscribers than Netflix in most markets outside North America?
Omdia presented numbers at CABSAT in Dubai. YouTube Premium sits at 3.7 million subscribers across MENA. Netflix at 3.0 million. The pattern repeats in chunks of Southeast Asia and Latin America. The assumption that Netflix owns streaming everywhere comes from looking at the US and forgetting that 68% of the world runs Android and watches content differently on smaller screens. YouTube was phone-native from the start. Netflix was built for a television and has been adapting ever since.
Gaming Downloads Fell 8.6% and Revenue Held Steady. Block Blast Knocked Roblox Off the Top.
Block Blast. Over 300 million downloads. Became the most downloaded game globally in 2025. Pushed Roblox down for the first time. And it is, genuinely, a block puzzle. Tetris-shaped pieces on a grid. No characters. No lore. No multiplayer lobbies.
Appfigures broke the gaming numbers out separately and the split is telling:
- Game downloads dropped to 39.4 billion (down 8.6%)
- Non-game downloads nudged up to 67.4 billion (up 1.1%)
- Game revenue… did not drop
Fewer people downloading new games. The ones still playing spending more inside them. That divergence between installs and revenue is sharper in gaming than any other category because games matured into their monetisation models faster than everyone else. The free-to-play funnel has been refined over a decade and the maths works even with a shrinking install base.
Games still hold 34.54 billion installs and 30.82% of all app downloads globally (AppTweak data). Biggest single category and not close. Entertainment sits second at 10 billion. But the trajectory inside gaming is consolidation. Fewer titles. More money per player. Simple formats beating complicated ones.
About 40% of all daily app downloads happen between 7pm and 10pm. Worth thinking about because that evening window is where every entertainment category on this list fights for the same three hours of someone’s attention. Streaming, gaming, scrolling, chatting, and a whole layer of browser-based activity that never touches an app store.
Casino tables updating in real time. Live dealer rooms where someone in a studio deals cards to people on their phones. Sports odds shifting during a match. NightWin Casino runs that way, sportsbook and casino and live tables from a browser tab, no install involved. That entire slice of evening phone entertainment sits in a blind spot for Sensor Tower and AppTweak because there is nothing to count when nobody downloaded anything.
ChatGPT Was Not Supposed to Be an Entertainment App. Usage Data Suggests Otherwise.
Google Gemini came in at 354 million downloads. Together with ChatGPT’s 770 million, two AI chatbots crossed a billion installs in a single year. Both categorised as Productivity in the app stores.
Except… a pretty large share of what people actually do with ChatGPT falls squarely into leisure. Bedtime stories for kids. Fictional scenarios. Role-play conversations. Image generation for fun. Song lyrics nobody will record but that were amusing to read. Planning imaginary trips they will never take. The productivity label is accurate for some users and completely wrong for others, and the split probably leans toward entertainment if anyone ever bothered to measure it properly.
Around 35% of new apps launched in 2025 had AI baked in (Sensor Tower’s count). Photo editors, tutoring bots, writing tools, image generators, voice changers. Lensa AI reached 50 million downloads and then caught grief for charging $200 a year. The EU opened investigations into something like 40% of AI apps over marketing that did not match what the product actually delivered.
Three years ago this category was basically nonexistent. Now an AI chatbot holds the record for fastest app to a billion downloads. Whether that reshuffles what “entertainment” means on a phone or just adds another layer on top of everything else, hard to say yet. The download numbers say it matters. What it means is still catching up.
Social Media Is a TikTok and Meta Duopoly
TikTok pulled somewhere between 644 and 740 million downloads in 2025 depending on whether you go by Business of Apps or AppMagic. Most downloaded social app again. Another year in a row.
After TikTok, the chart is basically Meta’s portfolio listed out:
- Messenger
Four of the top ten belong to one parent company. CapCut, which is TikTok’s video editing companion, also ranks near the top. Social media as a category consumes 34.7% of all time spent in apps, which is more than gaming, streaming, and productivity combined.
Music Is Spotify and Then a Long Gap Before Anything Else
Business of Apps gave Spotify the top entertainment app spot for 2025 and every other source confirms the same thing by a margin wide enough that it barely qualifies as a competition. YouTube Music is growing. Apple Music holds its base. Regional services have their pockets.
But the honest version is that the music streaming category settled years ago and has not unsettled since. Not every sub-category has a dramatic story.
What Shows Up When You Stack These Categories Together
Each entertainment segment on phones is doing its own thing and the trajectories do not all point the same direction.
- Streaming is splintering. Netflix shrinking in downloads, vertical short-form drama surging, YouTube beating Netflix on subscribers in most non-US markets.
- Gaming is squeezing. Fewer installs, more money per head, block puzzles winning over everything with a tutorial screen.
- AI showed up and pulled a billion downloads in a year out of a category that basically did not exist in 2023.
- Social is TikTok plus Meta, everyone else splitting the leftover attention.
- Music is Spotify. That sentence covers it.
And then the browser layer underneath all of it. Casino platforms, live dealer rooms, sportsbooks, web-only gaming, niche streaming accessed through a URL bookmark rather than an app icon. Real money, real sessions, real evening hours. Zero presence in any download chart ever published.
All of it competing for the same 7pm to 10pm window on the same phone held by the same person who worked all day and has roughly three hours before the screen goes dark and the charging cable goes in.
