Meta’s Muse Agent Is a Hit: 10 Million Downloads in 40 Days
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 2 sources
Meta’s Muse hit 10 million U.S. downloads in 40 days. That’s faster than ChatGPT, Grok, or Claude, but ad money is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Meta’s personal A.I. agent Muse is off to a blistering start in the United States. According to Sensor Tower, it passed 10 million U.S. downloads in just 40 days, making it only the 12th app ever to reach that milestone that quickly since the firm began tracking apps in October 2015. Meta’s own ad spending helped push it along, but the pace is still unusual even by app-store standards.
Muse launched in early September and, at first, was available only in the U.S. It now sits at about 10.9 million downloads overall, with 10.2 million of them coming from the U.S. The last app to move this quickly was Threads in July 2023. And most of the earlier apps that crossed 10 million U.S. downloads in 40 days were mobile games, not A.I. products.
The comparison with other A.I. apps is not flattering for the rest of the field. ChatGPT reached 3.7 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days and needed 123 days to get to 10 million. Grok had 500,000 U.S. downloads in 40 days and took 211 days to hit 10 million. Claude managed 200,000 in 40 days and took 673 days to reach the same mark. Globally, ChatGPT moved faster because it launched internationally from day one.
Muse has also spent time at the top of the charts. It was the No. 1 app in the U.S. Google Play Store for 30 days, and it finished No. 1 in Apple’s App Store on all but one of those days. On Oct. 16, it reached 2.5 million daily active users for the first time, while ChatGPT’s U.S. downloads fell 25 percent over the past 30 days.
Retention is a mixed bag. Among users who installed Muse in September, 30 percent were still around after seven days and 23 percent after 14 days, ahead of the average for ChatGPT, Grok and Claude. But Muse also sheds people fast right after install: 73 percent return the next day, then the figure falls to 23 percent by day 14, a much steeper drop than its rivals. Meta is also leaning hard on ads, with 39 percent of its U.S. advertising budget now going to Muse, up from 23 percent in September. The catch is that banks and brokers are already blocking A.I. agents like Muse from their accounts, so turning all those downloads into actual business is still an open problem.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic Meta: buy reach first, figure out the product story later. The app’s numbers look huge, but if users are vanishing after the first day and banks are shutting the door, that’s not a finished business model — that’s a very expensive popularity contest. The industry keeps mistaking ad fuel for demand, which is how you end up with a leaderboard and no clean path to revenue.
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