Meta's Muse AI app hits 10 million US downloads in its first 40 days

Meta's AI companion Muse has crossed 10 million U.S. downloads within its first 40 days on the market, a launch pace that very few apps have ever achieved. According to TechCrunch, which cites new figures from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Muse has recorded 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, and 10.2 million of those came from the United States.

A rare launch trajectory

Sensor Tower Senior Insights Analyst Kara Lee told TechCrunch that only 11 other apps have ever grown this fast out of the gate in the U.S. The most recent was Meta's own Threads, in July 2023. Most of the remaining names are mobile games, including Fortnite, PUBG Mobile and Pokémon GO, and Disney+ is the only other non-game app on the list besides Threads.

Paid momentum behind the numbers

TechCrunch attributes the result partly to Meta's distribution muscle. The company promotes new apps across its family of services, which now counts 3.6 billion daily active users, and it used the same playbook for Threads as it is using for Muse. But organic reach is not the whole story: Sensor Tower's data shows Meta devoted 39% of its total advertising budget to promoting Muse in October, up from 23% the month before. Muse has also climbed to become the 21st-largest brand in the U.S. ranked by advertising impressions this month, after sitting in 73rd place in September.

Retention and engagement are beating rivals

Sustaining interest after a splashy launch is a separate challenge, and here Muse also appears to be performing. Per Sensor Tower, the app held on to 30% of U.S. users after seven days and 23% after two weeks. Competing AI apps — ChatGPT, Claude and Grok — averaged 19% seven-day retention and 16% fourteen-day retention over the same framing.

Engagement is climbing as well. Muse reached 2.5 million daily active users for the first time on October 16, a 15% increase week over week.

How the competition compares

On U.S. downloads alone, Muse has comfortably outpaced other AI apps at the same point in their lifecycles. TechCrunch reports that ChatGPT logged 3.7 million U.S. installs in its first 40 days, while Grok managed 500,000 and Claude 200,000.

The global picture is less favourable to Meta, but TechCrunch notes the comparison is not apples-to-apples. ChatGPT reached roughly 15 million worldwide downloads in its first 40 days, helped by availability far beyond Muse's current U.S. and Canada footprint — Japan alone accounted for 25% of its installs in that window.

Muse has also been a fixture at the top of the app charts. It held the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store every day since launch except October 19, when the streaming app Kick briefly overtook it, and it reclaimed the top spot by the following Tuesday. It has also ranked No. 1 on Google Play for the past 30 days.

Why it matters

Muse's numbers are a marker for how quickly consumer AI products can scale when they are pushed through an incumbent's distribution channels and backed by serious ad spend. Downloads alone are a vanity metric if users churn, but the reported retention figures — above the average for ChatGPT, Claude and Grok — suggest Muse's early users are actually coming back. For Meta, that combination strengthens the case that its AI investments can convert into durable consumer behaviour rather than a one-off launch spike. For competitors, it shows the bar for breaking into consumer AI is now set by companies that can buy attention at billions-of-users scale.