Written by Vin Sathyamoorthy, former Zynga product manager and a Reddit product director. Current proud Texan, and a member of the Deconstructor of Fun consulting team. These facts aren’t mutually exclusive. 

Consumer Apps had a banner year in 2024, driving in-app monetization to record highs and beating Games in terms of worldwide revenue share. It’s also an exciting time to be talking about the future of Consumer Apps as we’re in the middle of several inflection points: the biggest and most exciting technology inflection is quite obviously AI. 

Societal inflection points are important catalysts for change as well: in the US, there is a growing anxiety about a dimming “American Dream” with high inflation and a housing gap affecting Gen Z / Millennials disproportionately. Another important societal inflection is the loneliness epidemic leading people to crave communal experiences. 

These inflections will shape 2025 in expected and unexpected ways. Let’s dive into our 2025 Predictions for Consumer Apps!

Prediction #1: The Social Media Crackdown Won’t Kill TikTok.

In the US, TikTok has until April 25, 2025 for the Trump Administration to “determine the best course forward” with the popular app. The options are: (1) ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) outright sells the US entity; (2) a joint venture between US companies and ByteDance, or (3) a TikTok shutdown in the US. 

I believe (1) is highly unlikely, because there were a number of high-profile buyers lined up prior to the Biden Administration deadline, and ByteDance refused to sell. Number (3) seems unpalatable to the Trump Administration and certainly to the 170M US TikTok users and the buyer / seller economy built on it. With the hardline stances taken geopolitically, I think Option (2), a joint venture, is the path forward for TikTok.

This will be a toss-up decision, but I think ultimately TikTok will continue to be available in the US for a few reasons: (1) it is widely popular among the US voting base and those who supported Trump; (2) it is a $10B+ annual Commerce play via TikTok Shop, with a large ecosystem of US buyers / sellers dependent on it; (3) it is a “check” against Meta who would otherwise have disproportionate control of social platforms. 

A joint venture, where a sanitized TikTok survives (with a completely US-based technical infrastructure and without its precious algorithm) is what I expect to happen. This will certainly be a more diluted version of the product, but perhaps it’s a more politically expedient strategy to not upset the voter base and give other US-native companies (e.g. YouTube, Twitter/X, Snap) time to create compelling TikTok substitutes.

Prediction #2: “Gamification” + AI Experiences Will Drive New Breakout Products in Finance, Education, and Health & Wellness Experiences.

The commonalities between Finance, Education, and Health & Wellness experiences are: (1) there’s a clear end goal with these things; (2) everyone wants to achieve these goals; (3) everyone kinda hates doing them. 

The “North Star” experience that everyone looks to is Duolingo (~$200M in quarterly revenue with a $15B market cap) - the app has 4x’ed its daily active users in five years and is approaching 40M DAUs. 

Gamification and AI will nicely complement each other because they will: (a) create personalized plans for you based on your short-term goals and long-term goals; (b) offer unlimited support, motivation, and lessons to keep you going; (c) make the experience fun while taking all the boring stuff out of the equation (e.g. having to figure out how many macros you are consuming daily). 

The product experiences won’t be limited to an “app screen” and can be multi-modal, allowing you to use voice, image, text, and other inputs like wearables to interact with apps.

With these trends in place, I think we will see the following in 2025: 

• New 1M+ user applications across Finance, Education, and Health & Wellness. We probably won’t have a 100M+ user phenomenon like ChatGPT, but we’ll have category-redefining apps in these self-improvement/growth areas. These apps will not look like traditional apps, and leverage AI, wearables, and sensors to interact with users across voice, text, and image. 

• A breakout Personal Finance app built for the middle-class. The Personal Finance use case is very compelling in a rough economic environment - imagine an app that can draw inputs from your spending, credit history and financial goals to optimize your Credit Score and your Savings. The market is hungry for a scaled Personal Advisor service that can automate purchases based on deals / discounts, recommend purchases that will save you, and “automagically” create dashboards of your financial health and encourage you to keep going. 

Prediction #3: Craving for Authentic + Community Experiences Will Drive New Product Experiences.

As noted in Prediction #2, people are going to flock to AI solutions because they will offer a lot of benefits. This same explosion of synthetic AI data is going to drive people to seek out authentic, human experiences. Reddit - the OG home for communities - had an explosive IPO this year, 5x’ing in stock price and seeing DAU soar 50% YoY as Google search is increasingly prioritizing authentic results. 

I think a few things will happen in this space: 

• All major consumer apps will have a community play. YouTube recently beefed up their “Communities” product offering, to ensure authentic conversation between creators (like Graham Stephen, Marques Brownlee) and fans. Authentic human conversation is key to engagement / retention, and will increasingly be important for reach. 

• Airbnb will release an upgraded “Experiences” product, others will follow suit. People are craving in-person, immersive experiences - shared with other people. Airbnb will make a major play at this by upgrading Experiences, so it’s got the magic of their “Icons” product (e.g. stay at Barbie’s dream house or float in the clouds inside the Disney “Up” house) with sustainable margins. Airbnb is targeting “Disneyland experiences on a local budget” - they want to capture the “going out to the movies on the weekend” use case that used to be common. Other consumer experiences will learn from this and do similar things.  

• Live Shopping will have a banner year: TikTok Shop, Amazon Live and Whatnot will lead live shopping growth outside of China, and the global GMV of live shopping will surpass $1T in the next 1-2 years. People love the social aspects of building relationships with creators and like-minded communities, and the game-like experience of bidding on auctions or buying mystery box items.  

Prediction #4: YouTube will be THE dominant cultural force - its gravitational pull will be felt in all consumer apps.

2025 will be the year that traditional TV is pronounced dead, and YouTube will be crowned its usurper. Ironically, YouTube will have accomplished this without producing any content of its own. But because YouTube claims the lion’s share of media consumption (see graph below), it will be the dominant shaper of culture and thought. 

YouTube is showing they can move fast and accommodate new formats. Livestreaming, Shorts, Creator Paid Products - they have them all. YouTube has music licensing with all major labels, streaming deals with sports leagues and they’ve started offering AI Creator Tools too. Veo 2 will be an incredible complement to high-quality video production. 

Amazon, Apple and FAST Channels / Platforms will all have their place in the video consumption universe, but YouTube is the most complete and vast offering on the internet. In 2025, YouTube will definitively prove that it is TV reimagined for the internet age. 

• YouTube will take on new forms of “traditional media” in its flagship app. YouTube has already added blockbuster movies like Interstellar, Jurassic World and Jason Bourne as free offerings in their app. I expect them to tinker with FAST channels, YT Creator “TV Series” and potentially even take on live sports / events. 

• YouTube will give Podcasting a dedicated presence in the app. Spotify and YouTube are competing intensely for the Podcasting use case - the format is creating new hit products regularly (Kylie Kelce’s new show beating Joe Rogan in Dec-24, $100M deals for Alex Cooper, the Kelce brothers’ “New Heights” show and Will Arnett’s “Smartless”) and has great unit economics. Podcasts will get a dedicated space in the app so consumers can enjoy long-form content - possibly with the TV version of the app first, as it fits the “sit back and watch” style of consumption best. 

• YouTube Shopping will get major upgrades in 2025. With a $10B+ business waiting in the wings, YouTube will pursue this aggressively to sell Creator merchandising, recommended products and more. YouTube’s existing Shopify partnerships will get deeper so it’s that much easier for users to find recommendations and impulse buy.

Prediction #5: The Second Coming Of Super Apps in the West. 

The West hasn’t seen a breakout hit yet of the likes of WeChat, Rappi and Kakao - but there are a number of contenders looking to give it a shot: 

• Uber is paving a “Super App” path by building transportation, food delivery, groceries, local services and even travel / hospitality into a single app. 

• Elon Musk is driving X to be a complete digital ecosystem, with communications, payments, commerce and more sitting on the platform. X already offers AI generation via Grok, which makes content creation / distribution easier than ever. 

• Super.com is trying to build a super app for saving, by combining savings on travel, ability to earn cash back on purchases, etc. into a single experience. 

What’s interesting is that in all three efforts, the company (Uber, X, Super.com) can succeed without being at the expense of the other. I believe in 2025, (a) Uber will make a play for a major travel / hospitality product to enhance their core; (b) X will try to take the place of legacy media and take it one step further by being the place to have a bi-directional conversation between the people and political leaders. 

Conclusions

As noted at the top, technology and societal inflection points will play a huge role in how Consumer Apps shape up in 2025 - I think the two major themes will be AI’s rapid maturation and authentic human connection. These themes will play out over the next 5-10 years; 2025 will be the beginning of that journey. 

While AI will enable unprecedented personalization and efficiency across finance, education, and wellness applications, we will also see a parallel development in community-driven experiences and live experiences: demonstrating that technology's greatest value lies in augmenting rather than replacing human interaction. 

This duality - between AI-powered convenience and authentic engagement - will define the next wave of successful consumer applications, with platforms like YouTube and emerging super apps serving as the connective tissue between digital utility and cultural relevance.