GoKawiilBetween January and August 2025, App Store revenue from generative AI apps nearly tripled,
largely driven by ChatGPT subscriptions. Here are the details.
GenAI apps reportedly paid nearly $900M in App Store fees in 2025
According to a new report by AppMagic (via WSJ), “Apple’s revenue from GenAI apps rose from about $35 million in January 2025 to a high of $101 million in August,” before trending back down due to a decline in downloads of ChatGPT.
And speaking of ChatGPT, AppMagic says that OpenAI’s chatbot accounted for nearly 75% of the total commission gains from generative apps on the App Store, followed by Grok, at 5%.
As the WSJ notes, that’s a notable sum for a company that still lacks a true rival to ChatGPT and similar products, and a welcome buffer as Apple works out its partnership with Google to have Gemini work as the underlying technology of the revamped Siri:
Its Siri chatbot is still weak by modern AI standards. What Apple does have that the other AI players don’t is a dominant position making devices. However fancy OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI make their chatbots, iPhones are still a primary way to deliver them to consumers.
And
Apple’s AI plan runs counter to strategies of competitors that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chips and data centers to build frontier large language models. Apple is spending a fraction of that, aiming instead to use all the personal information people store on their iPhones together with chips it designs itself to power an on-device AI strategy.
Neither Apple nor Google has discussed the financial terms of their partnership, but Bloomberg reported last year that it would be a “about $1 billion a year” deal.
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