It's no secret that AI apps are one of the fastest-growing trends, generating millions for developers. If you're thinking, "all the opportunities must be gone by now" you will be incorrect.
Releasing a thin wrapper in 2025 isn't likely to generate the amount of money it did back in early 2023, but almost every other category is booming!
I combined a few datasets I took from our AI market report to highlight the categories you should be looking at if you want to get in on the action:
The combination of revenue, number of apps from the category in the Top 1,000, and year-over-year growth rate makes it very easy to see where you should focus if you want to ride this wave.
I omitted the Core Models and General Assistants categories from this analysis because building a new LLM is not for most of us and General Assistants are not only the most saturated category but also the one with the least revenue growth.
The First Obvious Opportunity
At the top of the opportunities list is the Utilities category. It was 5th in terms of overall revenue, isn't as crowded the Graphics Generators and Photo & Video Editors, and saw year-over-year revenue grow 2,990% in 2024. The most of all categories in the report.
The Utilities category is pretty broad, containing apps that identify plants and coins, apps that help with interior design, and others. I expect we'll see a lot more growth in this category as AI adds convenience to these kinds of tasks.
The Second Obvious Opportunity
The other very obvious opportunity is a bit smaller, but also growing fairly quickly. Voice records may have only generated $24M so far, per the report, but that's grown 2,270% in 2024.
The trends (on page 77 of the report) slope down a bit in Q4, but I expect to see more apps come into this category in 2025 and revive the exponential growth the category saw for most of 2024.
That said, every category grew at least three digits which indicates there's a lot of hunger for the kind of convenience AI can bring via app.
Check out the growth rates for all categories on page 31 of the report.
I crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded mobile apps in the world. November's ranks didn't change who's on ...
November was an interesting month in terms of earnings. Almost unique. It's not because a new name came out of nowhere t...