Downloads are cheap if you own the biggest distribution network on earth. Retention isn’t. That’s what makes Meta’s Muse interesting, because it is doing well on both counts, at least for now.
According to Sensor Tower data reported by TechCrunch, Muse has pulled in 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of them in the U.S. Only 11 other apps have hit 10 million U.S. downloads in their first 40 days. The most recent was Meta’s own Threads in July 2023. Most of the rest were mobile games, as Sensor Tower analyst Kara Lee noted.
The playbook is familiar. Threads rode on Instagram’s social graph, and Muse is promoted across a family of apps with 3.6 billion daily active users. But Meta is also paying for growth. Sensor Tower says Muse took 39% of Meta’s total ad spend in October, up from 23% in September. It is now the 21st largest U.S. brand by ad impressions this month, up from 73rd. That’s a serious push, and it means the download count says as much about Meta’s checkbook as about product pull.
So look at retention. In the U.S., Muse kept 30% of users after 7 days and 23% after 14 days. Rivals like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok averaged 19% and 16%. Ads can buy installs, but they can’t make people come back. A gap of roughly 10 points at day seven is hard to explain with marketing alone. Daily active users also reached 2.5 million on October 16, up 15% week over week.
The comparisons with competitors are lopsided in Muse’s favor. ChatGPT saw 3.7 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days, Grok 500,000 and Claude 200,000. Muse reached the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store and held it every day except October 19, when streaming app Kick briefly passed it. It has also led Google Play for the past 30 days.
But there are caveats. Globally, ChatGPT still wins, with about 15 million downloads in its first 40 days against Muse’s 10.9 million. That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, though. Muse is available only in the U.S. and Canada, while ChatGPT drew users from Japan, Brazil and Germany. Japan alone made up 25% of its early global installs. Also, ChatGPT launched into a market with no real alternatives. Muse arrived when users already had several assistants on their phones, and Meta’s early-days numbers for Claude and Grok reflect a different era of AI app adoption too.
Does this matter? Yes, with some limits. For OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, Meta is now a consumer rival with distribution they can’t match and, apparently, a product people keep using. Developers building consumer AI apps should note that a free, heavily promoted assistant inside the world’s biggest social platforms raises the bar for everyone. Still, 40 days is early. The real test is whether those 2.5 million daily users hold when the ad spend cools and international rollout begins. If retention stays well above rivals at that point, the competitors have a problem. If it slides toward 19%, Muse is just another well-marketed launch.
