Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
83,000 downloads bought Meta's Muse the No. 2 spot on the App Store
Sensor Tower puts Muse past 83,000 iOS downloads in the United States in its first two days. Threads did more than 4.3 million on its launch day, and the Meta AI app did 108,000 on its first. Muse is No. 2 anyway.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Meta launched its agentic AI app Muse on Tuesday, and market intelligence firm Sensor Tower puts it north of 83,000 iOS downloads in the United States, the only market where the app is available.
- That total carried Muse up the US App Store Top Charts, from No. 4 on Wednesday to No. 2.
- ChatGPT topped half a million US installs in less than a week after it arrived, at a point when the US was its only market as well.
- On Google Play, Muse has reached only No. 338 in the Productivity category, and its Android download numbers are not yet available.
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Why it matters
- constraint A No. 2 badge cannot carry a demand argument when the base underneath it is smaller than Meta's previous AI app managed on a single day. Teams citing the rank in a launch review are citing store traffic.
- decision Anyone picking a consumer agent this quarter is weighing Instinct's shipping pace against Meta's distribution with no published retention number on either side.
- exposure Muse asks users to hand Meta more personal information while the company is settling an $18 billion multistate case and carrying repeat FTC privacy fines.
- precedent TechCrunch's read is that a graph built from who people actually talk to could outvalue Meta's friend graph. Contact data would then sit at the centre of the consumer agent contest.
Split Sensor Tower's 83,000 across the two days Muse has been out and the run rate is about 41,500 US iOS downloads a day [1]. ChatGPT's debut, spread evenly across its first week, averaged 83,300 a day in the same market [7]. Meta's own Meta AI app cleared 108,000 on its debut, roughly 25,000 more than Muse has managed in twice the time [5][4]. Threads' launch day was about 52 times Muse's running total [2].
The badge and the download count answer different questions. TechCrunch reports that Meta is beginning to win over Wall Street following Tuesday's launch [10]; the base underneath the ranking is 83,000 taps in one storefront, in the one country where the app is available [2].
A chart position records how many people downloaded an app in one store on one day, measured against everything else in that store. In a launch review it tends to get read as evidence that consumers want agents. The estimate does cut Meta's way in places: Muse also runs on the web and inside WhatsApp, and Sensor Tower counts neither [9]. Repeat use is the gap, and no one has published a figure for it. TechCrunch's report carries installs and ranks and nothing about whether anyone opened Muse a second time [11].
The rival TechCrunch names as the one to beat is Instinct, an agent that works over text messages, recently valued at $2.5 billion and holding $350 million [12][13]. In the past several days Instinct gave every user an email address, added Stripe and 1Password integrations, and shipped location sharing so the agent can act on where the user is [14][15]. TechCrunch also describes Instinct's privacy policy as overly broad and permissive [16].
For anyone who has to act on it, a launch number turns on whether it is absolute or relative to the store's traffic that day, and whether it counts first taps or returns. Chart rank is relative and first-touch, which makes it the cheapest figure in a deck to move. Sensor Tower's 83,000 is absolute and still first-touch [2]. For whoever has to defend a Muse pilot in a fortnight, the number that would settle it is second-week opens, and no one has put one in public [11].
What to watch
- Muse's Android download numbers, when they appear, set against that No. 338 Productivity rank on Google Play.
- Whether Muse holds a top-five App Store position into its second week, and whether anyone publishes a return-visit figure.
- Whether Instinct's agent-to-agent network and its privacy policy draw regulatory attention as it spends the $350 million.