Meta's Muse tops App Store charts as Charm wearable extends it to glasses

Muse tops the charts and spreads across hardware

Meta's consumer AI agent Muse has hit the top of the App Store charts since its release, with roughly 600,000 daily active users in the US according to an Apptopia estimate reported by The Verge. The software push comes with hardware attached: at its Connect event, Meta said Muse will arrive on all of its smart glasses and introduced Charm, a standalone wearable built so users can carry their agent with them.

The face of the product is a mascot named Jolly, a name chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the event. The Verge's Victoria Song described Charm as a mix of chunky smartwatch, Humane Ai Pin and Tamagotchi, and noted that CTO Andrew Bosworth demonstrated his own agent, dressed in a tiny pilot outfit.

An OpenClaw resemblance Meta doesn't deny

According to The Verge, social media users have spent recent days arguing that Muse is essentially a wrapper around OpenClaw, the open-source agent platform that turned a one-man weekend project into a phenomenon, drawing about two million visitors and 100,000 GitHub stars in roughly a week. The claimed evidence includes identical names for core files such as SOUL.md, memory and tools, plus near-identical language in the documents that govern each agent's personality and tone.

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, pushed back on X, insisting Muse was built from scratch while conceding it was heavily inspired by OpenClaw as a product. He said that after trying OpenClaw in January he bought hundreds of Mac Minis for his team, and that Muse kept certain conventions because OpenClaw's creator had gotten them exactly right.

The lineage matters because OpenClaw set the template the industry is now copying at scale. The Verge traces the dominoes: OpenAI hired creator Peter Steinberger in February, Google announced its consumer agent bets in May, Apple went all-in on agents in June, agent platform Instinct raised hundreds of millions in August while its creator fundraises at a $2.5 billion valuation, and Meta introduced Muse in September.

A Tamagotchi pitch aimed at Gen Z

TechCrunch frames Charm as on-trend even if its success is uncertain: it resembles a virtual pet, but it really rides the bag-charm wave that produced the Labubu craze and a cottage industry of Apple Watch keychains. Pop Mart, Labubu's retailer, saw revenue reach $1.8 billion in 2024, a sevenfold jump from 2019, and one analyst firm estimates the global bag charm market will pass $1 billion by 2030. Charm also fits a broader retro-tech revival among young people who want technology they can physically hold.

TechCrunch cautions that AI hardware has already claimed victims like the Ai Pin, the Rabbit and the Friend pendant, and that Meta's history of FTC privacy settlements makes consumer trust a real obstacle. Hands-on testing reported by The Verge suggests the underlying agent is still rough: a demo agent misstated a snack's protein content, took noticeably long to answer simple questions, and failed to add an item to a shopping cart because it was not in the catalog.

Security and privacy caveats

Zuckerberg has said Muse was designed for privacy and security from the ground up, with user data and credentials stored on an isolated Linux virtual machine with its own browser, CPU, memory and storage. The Verge reports the reality is more complicated. Meta itself can still access data in that VM, with a cryptographically verifiable barrier promised later this year. Muse also defaults to letting Meta train its models on user data, though users can opt out. Worst of all, a researcher flagged a zero-day vulnerability this week that reportedly lets an attacker take complete control of an agent.

That record still compares favorably with OpenClaw, where a top-downloaded skill contained malware and one researcher found malicious instructions in 15 percent of the platform's skill repository. But TechCrunch points to Meta's long run of privacy violations as a reason for skepticism, and argues the company's end game is highly personalized advertising. Meta says it will monetize Muse by taking a small fee on transactions.

Why it matters

Muse represents the moment consumer AI agents move from an open-source grassroots movement to a Big Tech distribution machine, shipped through an app store, smart glasses and a fashion accessory. The trade on offer is convenience and cuteness in exchange for handing enormous personal context to a company whose core business is targeted ads. Whether Meta's version genuinely improves on the security failures of its open-source predecessor, rather than simply repackaging it, will shape how much trust the mainstream is willing to extend.