Muse, Meta’s AI companion, is currently one of only 12 mobile apps to reach 10 million downloads in the U.S. in its first 40 days on the market. Muse has had 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of which were in the United States, according to new data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower.
According to Kara Lee, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, only 11 other apps have reached this kind of post-release milestone to date. The most recent of these was Meta’s Threads dating back to July 2023.
Lee pointed out that other apps that have experienced this kind of scale are primarily mobile games, such as Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, and Pokémon GO. Besides Threads, Disney+ was the only non-gaming app to join the exclusive club.
Meta’s success has to do with the company’s ability to scale new apps by marketing them across its other services, which it has done with both Threads and Muse. Threads is built on Instagram’s social graph and its content is integrated with both Facebook and Instagram. But Muse isn’t just benefiting from Meta’s ability to sell AI agents across a family of apps that currently includes 3.6 billion daily active users. The company is also investing heavily in advertising to drive new users to Muse.
According to Sensor Tower data, Meta allocated 39% of its total ad spend to Muse marketing in October, up from 23% last month. Additionally, Muse ranks as the 21st brand in the U.S. for ad impressions this month, up from 73rd place in September.
Still, marketing your app is one thing, retaining users after the initial shine wears off is another. In this case, Muse has a higher retention rate than AI competitors such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.
In the US, apps had a 30% retention rate after 7 days and a 23% retention rate after 14 days. In comparison, competitors had an average 7-day retention rate of 19% and 14-day retention rate of 16%, according to the company’s data.
Muse also achieved another milestone that marks its active engagement with AI apps. The number of daily active users reached 2.5 million for the first time on October 16th, an increase of 15% from the previous week.
Meta’s latest AI app, which can handle a variety of tasks on your behalf, has been a huge success since its debut. It shot straight to number one on the App Store, and at one point even surpassed some of the metrics ChatGPT saw post-release. ChatGPT once again surpassed its rivals in its latest milestone, achieving 3.7 million downloads in the US in its first 40 days on the market. Grok and Claude only saw 500,000 and 200,000 downloads, respectively, in the US in their first 40 days.
Globally, ChatGPT surpassed Muse, reaching approximately 15 million downloads worldwide in the first 40 days. However, this is not a fair comparison as ChatGPT benefits from a much wider range. Muse is currently only available in the US and Canada, but ChatGPT’s app has also attracted attention from markets such as Japan, Brazil, and Germany. (For example, Japan accounted for 25% of global installs in the first 40 days.)
Since its launch, Muse has been ranked No. 1 in the U.S. App Store every day except October 19, when it was briefly overtaken by streaming app Kick. It has since regained the top spot as of Tuesday. Muse has also been number 1 on Google Play for the past 30 days.
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