In 2025, the South Korean mobile app ecosystem experienced a historic turning point. According to the latest data, YouTube surpassed local social giant KakaoTalk (46.35 million MAU) and comprehensive portal Naver (44.94 million MAU) with 48.13 million monthly active users (MAU), becoming the most frequently used mobile app in South Korea for the first time. This change not only marks the full mainstreaming of video content consumption but also reflects a deeper shift in South Korea's digital life from instant messaging and information aggregation to immersive entertainment and knowledge acquisition.
At the same time, another disruptive force is quietly rising. Although ChatGPT ranked 27th in average MAU throughout the year (about 9.98 million), its growth has been explosive—reaching 16 million new installations throughout 2025, leading all apps; more notably, its MAU in December increased by 341% year-over-year, setting a rare record for AI application adoption speed in the South Korean market. This data reveals a key trend: generative artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from an early adopter phase into everyday user scenarios.
The rapid popularity of ChatGPT far exceeds the expansion pace of other popular apps during the same period. Its success is not only driven by global technological trends but also due to a high degree of alignment with local strategies and user needs. In diverse scenarios such as education, work efficiency, creative assistance, and daily conversations, South Korean users are viewing ChatGPT as an indispensable intelligent collaborator. This "low threshold, high value" experience allows it to become an unavoidable variable in South Korea's digital ecosystem in 2025, even though its MAU base is still smaller than that of top apps.
YouTube's rise and ChatGPT's rapid growth together outline a new picture of South Korea's mobile internet: one side is the deep videoization of content consumption, while the other is the intelligent transformation of interaction methods. These two trends coexist and indicate that the core of future app competition will no longer be just functions or traffic, but who can better integrate into users' cognition and daily lives.
