The Opportunities in AI Apps No One's Talking About Right Now

Ariel Ariel
Jan. 31

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Big Opportunities for AI Apps. Check out the full article for more insights.


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.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.

All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #ai

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