Apple collected nearly $900 million in App Store fees from generated AI apps in 2025, according to data from analytics firm AppMagic. wall street journal ($).
The vast majority of Apple’s AI app fee revenue comes from ChatGPT downloads that lead to subsequent subscriptions, which alone account for approximately 75% of the total mentioned above. Elon Musk’s Grok app came in a distant second place, accounting for just 5% of revenue.
Apple is now said to be on track to earn $1 billion in generated app revenue this year. That’s certainly a significant amount considering how far the company is behind the AI race, highlighted by the slow rollout of enhanced Siri.
Of course, Apple benefits from the popularity of AI apps built by other companies because the iPhone remains the smartphone market leader. Most AI apps still have to go through the App Store, and Apple takes up to a 30 percent commission on subscriptions. The report states:
“The company’s Siri chatbot is still weak by modern AI standards. What Apple has that other AI players don’t is its dominant position in building devices. No matter how fancy chatbots OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI make, the iPhone remains the primary vehicle for delivering chatbots to consumers.”
This revenue stands in contrast to Apple’s relatively modest AI spending compared to rivals such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Rivals have all poured tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, but have yet to see little or no profit. Meanwhile, Apple’s capital spending has remained relatively flat as it prioritizes investments in on-device AI over large-scale data centers with GPU processors.
This strategy won’t result in a more capable Siri, but Apple seems happy to rely on Google to provide the AI infrastructure needed to do so. The companies announced in January that Gemini will be included in an improved version of Apple’s virtual assistant coming later this year. Financial terms of the partnership have not been disclosed, but bloomberg Last year, we reported that the deal would be worth about $1 billion annually. This gives Apple access to a 1.2 trillion parameter model that dwarfs its capabilities.
Perhaps the deeper irony is that since Google already pays Apple about $20 billion a year to remain the iPhone’s default search engine, the money is now flowing in other directions as well, albeit at a much lower rate.
Still, some investors see the App Store approach as a more viable long-term strategy. Charles Reinhart, chief investment officer at Johnson Asset Management, said: WSJ If Apple can “act as a toll road for AI providers, it will probably have better long-term results.”
