AI companion app statistics (August 2026)

How many people use AI companion apps

AI companion apps had been downloaded about 220 million times globally across the Apple App Store and Google Play as of July 2025, with 60 million downloads in the first half of 2025 alone, up 88% year over year, per Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch. Those counts cover mobile stores only; web-first companion sites sit outside them.

Adoption runs deepest with the youngest users. In a nationally representative Common Sense Media survey of 1,060 U.S. teens (April and May 2025), 72% had used an AI companion at least once and 52% use one a few times a month or more. In the same survey, 67% of teens found AI conversations less satisfying than talking with real friends, 21% found them about the same, and 10% found them more satisfying. Half of teens (50%) said they do not trust information or advice from AI companions; 23% said they do. Source: Talk, Trust, and Trade-offs.

What the category earns, and what it charges

Consumer spending on AI companion mobile apps reached $221 million cumulative worldwide as of July 2025, with $82 million spent in the first half of 2025 and the category on track to clear $120 million for the year, per Appfigures estimates. Revenue is heavily concentrated: the top 10% of apps generate 89% of category revenue, and of 337 active revenue-generating apps, 128 launched in 2025. Revenue per download more than doubled year over year, from $0.52 in 2024 to $1.18 in 2025. All of these figures exclude web billing, which is where many companion sites actually charge.

On the charging side, my own ledger fills the gap the app-store data cannot see. Across the 20 apps on my pricing board, entry plans run from $7.99 to $56.29 a month (median $19.99), and 14 of 20 apps sell an internal currency on top of the subscription. Converted at each app's own rates, one image runs $0.08 to $2.60 and one video $0.50 to $9.99. I have logged 0 price changes since the board started, each with a date. The full ladder, per-app price sheets, and history live on the pricing tracker.

Apps I have paid for and tested myself: Secret Desires AI ($7.99/mo), Candy AI ($13.99/mo), Lovescape AI ($19.99/mo), OurDream AI ($19.99/mo), Swipey AI ($19.99/mo). Each links to the app; my reviews are on the apps index.

The safety and privacy record

The category's public record is unusually well documented, and unusually bad. When Mozilla's *Privacy Not Included team reviewed 11 romantic AI chatbot apps, 10 of the 11 failed its Minimum Security Standards; the same 11 apps had racked up roughly 100 million Google Play downloads. Researchers counted 24,354 data trackers firing within one minute of using one app. Source: Mozilla Foundation, February 2024.

The breach record is concrete. In September 2024 the "AI girlfriend" site Muah.AI exposed 1.9 million email addresses alongside users' AI prompts and stated sexual fetishes, per the Have I Been Pwned record. In May 2025 the Italian privacy regulator announced a 5 million euro fine against Luka Inc., Replika's operator, for processing without an identified legal basis and operating with no age verification as late as February 2023 (Garante press release). And in October 2025, Character.AI announced it would remove open-ended chat for under-18 users entirely by November 25, 2025.

Design itself is under scrutiny: a Harvard Business School working paper found emotional manipulation tactics in 37% of AI companion farewells (guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks), and showed in preregistered experiments with 3,300 U.S. adults that those tactics boost post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times (HBS Working Paper 26-005).

From my own tracking of the category's churn: SpicyChat has no official status page at all and left the Apple App Store in September 2025, Character.AI's own status page is locked to team members, and JanitorAI's recommended free model routes broke when DeepSeek retired two models its help pages still teach. Apps in this category change price, policy, and existence fast; that instability is why every figure on this page carries a date.

What researchers are measuring

• ~48k turns: of real user conversations with GPT-4.1, Character.AI, and Replika audited for what companion models optimize for in vulnerable conversations (arXiv:2606.04431, June 3, 2026).
• 2,909 posts: from 79 subreddits analyzed to trace privacy concerns across the lifecycle of romantic AI companions (arXiv:2603.21106, March 22, 2026).
• 376 bots: user-created NSFW chatbots analyzed on FlowGPT, with some generating explicit material even without erotic prompts (arXiv:2601.14324, January 20, 2026).
• majority: of all bounty requests on the Civitai marketplace are now NSFW, and 20% of requesters account for roughly half of requests (arXiv:2601.09117, January 14, 2026).

How to cite this page

Cite it as "NoFilterReview, AI Companion App Statistics, August 2026" with a link to this URL. The page is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse any figure with attribution. External figures always belong to their primary sources, which are linked beside each number; when you can, cite the primary source and this page together. I re-check external sources on a monthly pass and my own price data continuously; corrections go to [email protected] and publish with their date.