Meta’s AI agent Muse is now the No. 2 app in the US
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 12 sources
Meta’s new AI app Muse hit No. 2 on the U.S. App Store. The launch is solid, but it’s nowhere near Threads-level hype.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Meta is getting a warmer read from Wall Street after Tuesday’s launch of Muse, its new AI app built around agents that do things for users. Early download data suggests the app is finding an audience, but not at the kind of breakneck pace Meta has seen before.
Sensor Tower says Muse has passed 83,000 iOS downloads in the U.S., which is enough to push it to No. 2 on the App Store’s Top Charts. That’s a decent start, but it looks modest next to Meta’s recent launches. Threads pulled in more than 4.3 million U.S. downloads on day one, and the Meta AI app hit 108,000 U.S. downloads during its debut.
The comparison to ChatGPT is even tougher. In less than a week, ChatGPT had crossed half a million U.S. installs, and if you spread that evenly across the launch period, it was averaging 83,300 downloads a day. Muse needed twice the time to reach that number. That doesn’t prove the launch is weak. It may just be slower.
The app is still moving upward on iPhone, climbing from No. 4 on Wednesday to No. 2 today. Android is a different story: Muse sits at No. 338 in Google Play’s Productivity category, and Meta hasn’t shared Android download totals yet. Muse is also available on the web and through WhatsApp, but those installs aren’t included in Sensor Tower’s estimates.
What makes the launch matter is the bet behind it. Meta is leaning hard into agentic AI, arguing that consumer AI will be about assistants that actually get tasks done. It is a crowded field. Google has Gemini Spark, Anthropic has Claude Cowork, and the clearest rival right now appears to be Instinct, a text-message-based agent that was recently valued at $2.5 billion. Instinct also has $350 million to work with, plus a steady stream of features, which is the sort of thing that gets attention fast.
Muse’s timing may not have helped either. It asks for more personal information, and it arrived only days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement tied to a lawsuit over social media harms. That’s not exactly a soothing backdrop for a company asking people to trust it with even more data.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Meta keeps trying to sell people on a future where the same company that broke trust gets to rebuild it with AI. That is a bold strategy, especially when privacy concerns are still the headline and the app is already being judged against faster, cleaner rivals. The market may love “agents,” but users usually love them after the awkward part of handing over their data.
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