AI companion apps surge past 200 million downloads amid rapid growth

App-analytics firm Appfigures reported that AI companion apps — chatbots designed to converse as friends, romantic partners or fictional characters — had been downloaded roughly 220 million times across the Apple App Store and Google Play as of July 2025. Downloads in the first half of the year alone reached 60 million, up 88% on the same period in 2024.

The category’s revenue grew faster than its downloads. Consumer spending across companion apps reached an estimated $221 million lifetime by mid-2025, putting the sector on track to generate more than $120 million for the year — up 64% year-on-year. Revenue per download rose from $0.52 in 2024 to $1.18 in 2025, suggesting users who engage with these apps convert to paying customers at a growing rate. Replika, Character.AI, PolyBuzz and Chai were named as the market’s leading apps, out of 337 active, revenue-generating titles worldwide, 128 of them launched in 2025 alone.

The market was highly concentrated: the top 10% of apps captured 89% of category revenue, and only around 33 apps had crossed $1 million in lifetime spending. Appfigures also noted that “girlfriend” appeared in the names of 17% of active apps, reflecting the category’s lean toward romantic and intimate framing rather than generic companionship.

The figures arrived alongside a wider public conversation about AI companionship’s effects on users, particularly younger men, and followed incidents involving Character.AI that had already drawn lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. The growth numbers gave that debate a scale: a market that had been dismissed as a niche was, by these figures, adding tens of millions of downloads a year and approaching the size of a mainstream app category.