Muse, Meta’s AI companion app, collected 10.2 million US downloads in its first 40 days, a mark only 11 other mobile apps have reached. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported the figures on 20 October 2026, citing market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Across all countries, the app has been downloaded 10.9 million times since it launched in September.
The club is a strange one. Sensor Tower analyst Kara Lee told TechCrunch that most members are mobile games, including Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, and Pokémon GO. Only two apps outside gaming made the list: Disney+ and Meta’s own Threads, which got there in July 2023.
Against the other AI chatbots, the gap is wide. ChatGPT logged 3.7 million US downloads over its first 40 days, Grok about 500,000, and Claude about 200,000. Muse beat all three by a wide margin at home. Globally, ChatGPT still leads with roughly 15 million downloads in the same window. TechCrunch points out that the comparison is skewed, because Muse is only offered in the US and Canada while ChatGPT drew installs from Japan, Brazil, and Germany. Japan alone was 25 percent of ChatGPT’s global installs.
Downloads are the easy part, and Meta is paying to make them easier. Per Sensor Tower, Meta put 39 percent of its total advertising spend behind Muse in October, up from 23 percent in September. That moved Muse from 73rd to 21st among US brands by ad impressions. Meta can also promote the app across a family of products that the report puts at 3.6 billion daily users, the same route that carried Threads off the ground on top of Instagram.
Paid reach does not explain the retention numbers, though. In the US, 30 percent of Muse users were still around after seven days and 23 percent after 14 days. Sensor Tower puts the average for ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok at 19 percent and 16 percent. Muse’s daily active users hit 2.5 million for the first time on 16 October, up 15 percent from the week before.
Those retention figures come from one analytics vendor, and the report does not say how Sensor Tower defines the rival average or which days it measured. Still, a companion app that keeps 30 percent of its users at day seven against a 19 percent field average is doing something its ad budget alone cannot buy.
Rank on the stores backs up the story. Muse has held first place on the US App Store every day since launch except 19 October, when the streaming app Kick briefly passed it, and it was back on top by Tuesday. It has also led Google Play for the past 30 days.
The open question is what happens when Meta turns the ad dial down. Muse has a few weeks of data behind it, and its spending share has been climbing, not falling. If the 23 percent two-week retention holds once the ads cool, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok will be fighting for the same phone screen time against an app that already has Meta’s distribution behind it.
Reported by TechCrunch on 20 October 2026, with data from Sensor Tower.
