CMOS technology, which fueled the rapid growth of the information technology industry in the past 50 years, has also played and continues to play a crucial role in the remarkable development of detectors for High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. The amazing evolution of CMOS transistors in terms of speed, integration and cost decrease, allowed a continuous increase of density, complexity and performance of the front-end and readout circuits for HEP detectors. With the advent of CMOS Active Pixel Sensors (APS), where the sensing layer and its readout circuitry are combined in a single silicon device, CMOS became also the technology for a new generation of vertex and tracking detectors. After a brief historical excursus on the development of CMOS APS, their most recent developments and applications in HEP, as well as some examples in other scientific domains, will be presented. Novel developments and prospects for further improvement of these devices in terms of integration scale, timing and radiation hardness will be discussed.