Meta is putting its muscle behind Muse as the AI app takes off
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 24 sources
Meta is pushing Muse hard, and the AI app’s downloads have jumped past 3.4 million. The surprise is that most of the momentum still looks organic, not just paid ads.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Meta just gave Muse a very public shove, and the app seems to have liked the momentum. At the start of the week, the AI app had passed 2.5 million downloads since its September 8 launch. By Sensor Tower’s latest Thursday estimate, it was above 3.4 million. That’s before counting the full effect of Meta’s annual developer conference, where the company lined up a stack of new features for Muse, including video chat with the Muse avatar, Mac computer use, a dedicated email address, more partners and connectors, and future smart glasses support.
The app’s early pace was already strong before Meta’s big stage moment. Sensor Tower says Muse reached about 2.8 million downloads in its first two weeks on the app stores, from September 8 to September 17, and averaged 55% day-over-day download growth in that stretch. For a little context, ChatGPT averaged 24% day-over-day growth in its first 10 days after launch. Claude and Grok went the other way during their launches, with download growth declining.
Muse is also sitting at the top of the stores. It reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store on September 18 and has stayed there. It hit No. 1 on Google Play on September 19 and remains there as well. And while there’s clearly a lot of interest coming in on its own, Meta is helping by pushing the app across Facebook and Instagram, the same basic playbook that helped Threads get off the ground.
The wrinkle is that Meta says Muse needs a different kind of promotion than Threads. Instead of just blasting the app at users, the company is trying to show what the AI agent can actually do for a specific person. Sensor Tower says Meta started running house ads for Muse on September 9, then made Muse the main beneficiary of those promotions across its properties within 10 days. Meta has also taken the campaign to mobile ad networks and to Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube. By September 22, Sensor Tower ranked Muse among the top 10 brands by ad spend. Even so, ads only accounted for 6% of ad impressions from launch through September 19.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part where the AI app race starts looking less like a product contest and more like a distribution contest. Meta can seed an app everywhere it already has users, then call it momentum when the charts move. Clever, sure. Also a little on the nose.
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