This was first published July 9, in our weekly newsletter Apptopia Insight. To receive insights like this weekly, sign up here.
- Users are spending more time on AI chat bots
- Character.AI appears to impact NFLX users
- ChatGPT engagement continues to rise
- MSFT Copilot is facing an issue
In our last newsletter on AI Apps, we discussed how Character.AI has the best user engagement of all AI Apps (over two hours per day and how ChatGPT dominates DAU share among AI apps (55%). Today we will look a bit more into those trends and some first potential impacts on non-AI apps.
Users are spending more time on AI chat bots
Below is a table showing the YTD % change in time spent on some key AI apps. While some of these apps show a high growth rate because they are starting from a small base in January, the growth in engagement on these apps speaks for itself. Copilot stands out with particularly weak levels of engagement among the hyperscalers. Meanwhile DeepSeek continues to perform well.
Downloading Character.AI appears to hurt engagement on NFLX
Character.AI stands out in the table above due to the significant time spent on the app by its users – almost 2.5 hours on average per day. That is a lot of time out of their day! It needs to come from somewhere. One area it could come from is time spent on entertainment. For example, instead of watching a show, one might spend time on Character.AI instead. We tested this with NFLX, where we tracked how much time NFLX users spent on NFLX before downloading Character.AI and after downloading it.
NFLX users averaged ~50 minutes per day before downloading Character.AI. However, two months after downloading it, they average ~30 minutes per day on Netflix. While Netflix probably has little to worry about from Character.AI, since the app only has about 8m MAUs, the bigger concept of AI apps encroaching on our time spent on entertainment is a worry.
ChatGPT engagement continues to rise
ChatGPT not only has the most DAUs among AI apps, it also is engaging those users more and more. Below we present histograms of the average time spent per DAU on ChatGPT in June 2024 and June 2025. Notice how the percentage of users has shifted to the right, along with the average time spent.
10% of ChatGPT’s users now spend 30 minutes or more on the app each day, compared to 3% a year ago.
MSFT Copilot is facing an issue
In the table above, one can already see that Copilot is not engaging users well. At an average of four minutes per DAU on the app, it feels like most users check it out briefly, then just move on to something else. We updated our app churn data to test that theory and we saw a confirming trend – user churn (as Apptopia measures it) has risen above 50% in June. MSFT has a problem in the AI space and, at least from a mobile perspective, seems like it is losing ground.
User churn on Copilot, ChatGPT, and Character.AI
