Meta’s Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch

Meta’s latest AI app, Muse, could be the social giant’s next major hit, new data suggests. According to just- released estimates from market intelligence provider Apptopia, Muse’s app on mobile devices has been downloaded more times during its first twelve days on the market than ChatGPT was in the twelve days after its debut. (This data compares the U.S. and Canada markets only.)

Muse also has more daily active users than ChatGPT had at the time, the firm found.

Until now, it had been difficult to make an exact apples-to-apples comparison between these two apps, given that they had pursued different launch strategies. When ChatGPT arrived on mobile, it was made available globally, but only on iOS. Muse, meanwhile, is available across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, but only in the U.S. and Canada.

To better align the numbers for comparison, Apptopia looked only at the iOS data for the U.S. and Canada for both apps during the first twelve days of their respective launches. In this subset of the data, Muse has now seen 1.8 million downloads to ChatGPT’s 1.3 million.

Overall, Muse has seen 2.8 million total installs globally in its first 12 days, the firm also said. Its growth hasn’t yet stagnated, either; Muse has moved up from its original position as No. 2 overall on the U.S. App Store immediately after its launch to now No. 1, as Business Insider reported on Friday. That jump put the app higher than ChatGPT, the outlet noted. Another firm, Appfigures, said at the time that Muse had then crossed 1 million downloads.

Image Credits:Appfigures

In addition, Apptopia’s data indicates that Muse’s U.S. daily active users are now higher than they were for ChatGPT at the same point after its launch. When comparing just the U.S. mobile app daily active users, Muse comes in higher with 642,000 daily users compared with 231,000 for ChatGPT at the time.

To be fair to the fact that Muse is available across both iOS and Android, while ChatGPT launched on iOS only, Apptopia narrowed the comparison to iOS alone. Yet, even here, Muse is coming in higher with 359,000 daily active users on iOS, still above ChatGPT’s figures from that time period.

Apptopia can only provide third-party estimates about an app’s downloads and active users; it doesn’t have direct access to Meta’s internal figures. But even if these numbers are only correct from a general “ballpark” perspective, they indicate that Muse could have a shot at becoming Meta’s newest top app.

Meta already perfected its cross-promotion strategy when it launched Instagram’s Threads, which now has 500+ million users, thanks to heavy marketing and integrations in Meta’s largest apps, including Instagram and Facebook. Muse is likely to get a similar push, given that the AI app can connect with both of those platforms. It also works inside WhatsApp, so that could give it another boost.

While Apptopia doesn’t have visibility into Meta’s cross-promotion efforts or ads directly, it did note that over 95% of Muse’s users are also Facebook users and 63% are Instagram users.

Meta, which has been asked for comment, has not yet shared public figures related to Muse’s early adoption.

Correction: an earlier version of this article referenced the analytics firm Appfigures as a source for data from Apptopia. This has been fixed.