Meta's AI agent application, Muse, clinched the top spot on Apple's US free iPhone app chart on 18 September 2026, a mere ten days following its debut, racking up an estimated 730,000 downloads during that span, as per Sensor Tower projections.
Shares of Meta jumped about 7% on Monday.
This tally slightly exceeds the roughly 697,000 US downloads that OpenAI's ChatGPT accumulated in its initial eight days post-launch back in 2023, although the comparison periods differ by a two-day margin.
Rapid Ascent and the ChatGPT Comparison
Muse hit the market on 8 September via iOS, Android, the web at muse.ai, and WhatsApp. Initial momentum was tepid: Sensor Tower figures indicated around 83,000 US iOS downloads in the first 48 hours, translating to about 41,000 per day.
However, download velocity picked up in the following week, enabling Muse to surpass ChatGPT on the free-app rankings by 18 September, with a Mac version also arriving on 17 September. For context, ChatGPT averaged roughly 87,000 daily US downloads during its first eight days in 2023, an era when standalone AI apps were still a fresh concept. That approximately 697,000 US download figure stems from data.ai, not Sensor Tower.
Meta's previous AI offering secured 707,000 downloads within its first five days, while its social platform Threads amassed 4.3 million on launch day alone. Muse's trajectory lags both, having gathered approximately 730,000 downloads over a 10-day stretch.
An Agent That Executes, Not Merely Converses
Muse operates as a personal AI agent designed to handle multi-step tasks and keep functioning even when users exit the app. Its feature set includes dispatching emails, arranging travel, launching web browsers, completing forms, and bargaining on behalf of its users.
On the Mac platform, it integrates with files, messages, calendars, notes, and mail. This strategy diverges from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have woven agentic capabilities directly into their existing chat platforms rather than releasing a dedicated standalone agent application.
The complimentary tier provides roughly 100 million tokens weekly. A Power subscription is priced at $20 per month on iOS ($16 on the web) for 500 million tokens weekly, while a Maximum tier costs $100 monthly on iOS ($80 on the web) for three billion tokens per week.
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