Meta’s Muse hits 10M US downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps

Meta’s AI companion , Muse, is now one of only a dozen mobile apps to have reached 10 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days on the market. According to new data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower , Muse has seen 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of which were in the United States.

Only 11 other apps to date have reached this type of post-launch milestone, said Sensor Tower’s senior insights analyst Kara Lee. The most recent of these was Meta’s Threads, back in July 2023.

Other apps that saw this kind of scale were largely mobile games, Lee noted, like Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, Pokémon GO, and others. Besides Threads, Disney+ was the only other nongame app to make it into the exclusive club.

Meta’s success is tied to the company’s ability to scale its new apps by marketing them across its other services, which it has done with both Threads and Muse. Threads was built on top of Instagram’s social graph, and its content has been integrated into both Facebook and Instagram. However, Muse isn’t only benefiting from Meta’s ability to market the AI agent across its family of apps, which today includes 3.6 billion daily active users; the company is also heavily investing in advertising to drive new users to Muse.

Per Sensor Tower’s data, Meta has allocated 39% of its total advertising spend to market Muse in October, up from 23% last month. In addition, Muse now ranks as the 21st largest brand in the U.S. by advertising impressions this month, up from 73rd in September.

Still, marketing an app and retaining users after the initial shine wears off are two different things. In this case, Muse is seeing better retention rates than its AI competitors like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.