Meta AI assistant Muse surpasses 10 million US downloads 40 days after launch

IT Home, October 21 news: Meta's AI assistant Muse has now joined the ranks of just over a dozen mobile apps that have surpassed 10 million downloads in the US within 40 days of launch. The latest data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows that Muse has accumulated 10.9 million downloads since its September launch, of which 10.2 million were in the US.

Kara Lee, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said that so far only 11 other apps have reached this post-launch milestone, and the previous app to achieve it was Meta's Threads, in July 2023.

Lee noted that most of the other apps that reached this scale are mobile games, such as Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, and Pokémon GO. Apart from Threads, Disney+ is the only non-game app to make this elite list.

IT Home notes that Meta achieved this result by leveraging its other products to promote the new app, and both Threads and Muse used this playbook. Threads was built on Instagram's social graph, and its content has been integrated into Facebook and Instagram. Muse's growth has benefited not only from Meta promoting this AI agent across its entire family of apps, which have 3.6 billion daily active users, but also from the company devoting substantial advertising resources to driving traffic and new users to Muse.

Sensor Tower data shows that in October Meta allocated 39% of its total advertising budget to promoting Muse, up from 23% the previous month. In addition, by ad impressions, Muse rose to 21st place on the US brand rankings this month, compared with only 73rd in September.

However, promoting an app and retaining users after the hype fades are two different things. Muse's user retention performance is better than that of AI competitors such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.

In the US market, the app's 7-day retention rate is 30%, and its 14-day retention rate is 23%. By comparison, the firm's data shows that competitors have an average 7-day retention rate of 19% and a 14-day retention rate of 16%.

Muse has also reached another milestone that reflects user activity: on October 16, its daily active users reached 2.5 million for the first time, up 15% from the previous week.

This latest AI app from Meta, which can handle various tasks for users, has achieved explosive success since launch. It once topped the Apple App Store, with some metrics even exceeding ChatGPT's performance when it first launched. This new milestone once again widens the gap with competitors: ChatGPT had 3.7 million US downloads in its first 40 days, while Grok and Claude had only 500,000 and 200,000 US downloads, respectively, over the same period.

Globally, ChatGPT's downloads are higher than Muse's, at about 15 million worldwide in its first 40 days. But the two are not directly comparable, because ChatGPT targeted a broader market. Muse is currently available only in the US and Canada, while ChatGPT's app also attracted users in markets such as Japan, Brazil, and Germany (for example, in its first 40 days, Japan contributed 25% of its global installs).

Since launch, Muse has remained almost consistently at No. 1 on the US Apple App Store rankings, briefly surpassed only on October 19 by the streaming app Kick. As of local time Tuesday, it had reclaimed the top spot. Over the past 30 days, Muse has also consistently ranked No. 1 on Google Play.