Is AI Here to Stay? The Most Downloaded Apps in February

Ariel Ariel
3/7/25

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Non-Native Development is on the Rise. Check out the full article for more insights.


AI was at full blast in February, maintaining its January run. If you didn't notice, AI is red hot right now and these numbers prove it. But, did it make the most downloaded chart in February?

Yes, yes it did! Let's have a look at the ranks.

According to Appfigures Intelligence, TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app in the world in February. That's after it was banned in the US for much of the month. Although the US is big for TikTok's revenue it isn't for downloads, so this isn't really shocking, but interesting to see the difference between downloads (growth) and revenue (monetization).

The ban did knock down TikTok's downloads when compared to January, but it's back now, so it'll recover.

Chief rival Instagram came in second with 42M downloads. That's lower than January's haul as well but February is a shorter month so it's not terrible.

Normally, this is the part I'd list the remaining three apps that round out the top five and say they're exactly like last month but not this time!

ChatGPT broke a long monotonous run for Meta's trio, climbing two spots from January into the 3rd place in February and pushing Facebook and WhatsApp down with 36M estimated downloads. It looks like DeepSeek and Grok didn't hurt the OG but rather helped it grow even more.

That said, DeepSeek also made our top chart, coming in at 10th place with 20M estimated downloads. It's not common for an app to make it into our chart as soon as it's released, but DeepSeek's journey was nothing but common. Even though the hype is gone, DeepSeek is still seeing about 300K downloads every day.

The rest of the chart is mainly unchanged from January but being a shorter month, the total is lower. Our estimates show the top 10 most downloaded apps in the world made their way into 299M phones in February, which is more than a smidge lower than January.

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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.

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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.


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