Meta’s new AI agent app is climbing the charts, but maybe not as fast as the company hoped. According to TechCrunch, Muse has surpassed 83,000 iOS downloads in the United States since its Tuesday launch, which was enough to push it to the No. 2 spot on the App Store. That’s a real milestone. But context matters, and the context here is not flattering.
Sensor Tower data shows that Threads pulled in more than 4.3 million U.S. downloads on its launch day alone. The Meta AI app, which launched more quietly, still managed 108,000 U.S. downloads in its debut. Muse took twice as long to reach a number that ChatGPT was hitting daily in its first week. ChatGPT crossed half a million installs in under seven days in the U.S., its only market at the time. Muse isn’t collapsing, but it isn’t exploding either.
The Android picture is worse. Muse sits at No. 338 in the Productivity category on Google Play. That’s not a chart position anyone puts in a press release. Android download figures aren’t available yet, but the ranking alone says enough. The app is also accessible through the web and WhatsApp, and neither of those channels is captured in these estimates, which makes the iOS numbers the clearest signal available right now.
What makes Muse worth watching despite the modest start is what it represents strategically. Meta is betting that AI agents, systems that actually take actions on your behalf rather than just answer questions, are where consumer AI is heading. This is a bigger philosophical commitment than launching another chat interface. It’s closer in ambition to the company’s metaverse pivot, except this time the underlying technology is real and the competition is serious.
And the competition is intense. Google has Gemini Spark, Anthropic has Claude Cowork, and every major player is trying to own some part of the agentic AI space. But for consumer-facing general-purpose agents aimed at everyday users, the real race right now appears to be between Muse and Instinct, a text-message-based AI agent recently valued at $2.5 billion with $350 million in fresh capital. Instinct has been moving fast: this week it rolled out email addresses for all users and announced that its agents can now communicate with friends’ agents to coordinate plans. That’s a genuine social layer built on real-world relationships, not follower counts.
- Instinct launched Stripe and 1Password integrations
- Added a location-sharing feature for location-aware actions
- Introduced inter-agent communication so users’ agents can coordinate with friends’ agents
- Rolled out personal email addresses for all users
That inter-agent social graph is the part worth paying attention to. Meta’s core asset has always been its friend graph, but it’s a messy one built from years of follows, pokes, and passive connections. If Instinct builds a network based on who people actually talk to and make plans with, that could be a more accurate and more valuable social map. Meta knows this, which is probably part of why Muse exists at all.
There’s also the timing problem. Muse launched just days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over social media’s harms to consumers. The company has a long paper trail of privacy violations, FTC fines, and data scandals. And Muse asks users to hand over more personal information than most Meta products. That combination is not ideal for a debut week. Whether those concerns are slowing downloads is hard to prove, but it would be surprising if they had zero effect.
So where does this leave Muse? Still early, still climbing, and still a serious product from a company with enormous distribution. But the launch numbers suggest that consumer trust and a crowded field are both working against Meta right now. Instinct, for all its privacy concerns of its own, is shipping faster and generating more genuine excitement. Muse has the Meta machine behind it. That matters. But it isn’t automatically enough.
