Meta’s AI companion, Muse, is now one of only a dozen mobile apps to have reached 10 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days on the market. According to new data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, Muse has seen 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of which were in the United States.
Only 11 other apps to date have reached this type of post-launch milestone, said Sensor Tower’s Senior Insights Analyst Kara Lee. The most recent of these was Meta’s Threads, back in July 2023. Other apps that saw this kind of scale were largely mobile games, Lee noted.
Meta’s success is tied to the company’s ability to scale its new apps by marketing them across its other services, which it has done with both Threads and Muse. Threads was built on top of Instagram’s social graph, and its content has been integrated into both Facebook and Instagram. However, Muse isn’t only benefiting from Meta’s ability to market the AI agent across its family of apps, which today includes 3.6 billion daily active users; the company is also heavily investing in advertising to drive new users to Muse.
Per Sensor Tower’s data, Meta has allocated 39% of its total advertising spend to market Muse in October, up from 23% last month. In addition, Muse now ranks as the 21st largest brand in the U.S. by advertising impressions this month, up from 73rd in September.
Still, marketing an app and retaining users after the initial shine wears off are two different things. In this case, Muse is seeing better retention rates than its AI competitors like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.
In the U.S., the app had a 30% retention rate after 7 days and a 23% retention rate after 14 days. By comparison, its rivals saw an average of a 19% 7-day retention rate and a 16% 14-day retention rate, according to the firm’s data.
Muse also hit another milestone that demonstrates active engagement with the AI app. Its daily active users reached 2.5 million for the first time on October 16, a 15% week-over-week increase.
Meta’s latest AI app, which can handle various tasks on users’ behalf, has seen breakout success since its debut. It shot up to No. 1 on the App Store, and, at one point, even outpaced some of the metrics ChatGPT saw following its launch. Its latest milestone sees it topping its rivals again, as ChatGPT saw 3.7 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days on the market. Grok and Claude saw only 500,000 and 200,000 U.S. downloads, respectively, in their first 40 days.
Globally, ChatGPT beat out Muse, having scaled to around 15 million global downloads in its first 40 days. But this isn’t a fair comparison, as ChatGPT benefited from a wider reach. Muse is only available in the U.S. and Canada for now, while ChatGPT’s app attracted attention from markets like Japan, Brazil, and Germany, too. (Japan, for instance, accounted for 25% of its global installs during its first 40 days.)
Since launching, Muse has retained its No. 1 rank on the U.S. App Store for all days except October 19, when streaming app Kick briefly beat it out. It has since reclaimed the top spot as of Tuesday. Muse has also been No. 1 on Google Play over the past 30 days.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
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