Despite being US-only and iOS-only for its current expansion to 11 other global markets, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is off to a great start. The app has already been downloaded more than half a million times in the first six days since launch, according to a new analysis from app intelligence provider data.ai. That ranks it as one of the best-performing new app releases of both this year and last year, surpassed only by the February 2022 arrival of the Trump-backed Twitter clone, Truth Social.
As consumer demand for AI chatbots increased, other third-party apps calling themselves “ChatGPT” or “AI chatbot” have filled the App Store. While many of these were essentially fleeceware, trying to trick consumers into paying for expensive subscriptions to access their AI, a combined group of top apps still managed to rake in millions in consumer spending. This competitive landscape between AI chatbot apps could have created a more difficult market for an official ChatGPT app to gain traction. But that turned out not to be the case.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT app outperformed most of its rivals, including other popular AI and chatbot apps and Microsoft’s Bing and Edge apps, which delivered some of the first major integrations of OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology. third parties provided.
Image Credits: data.ai
While Bing and Microsoft Edge certainly benefited from the interest in ChatGPT when they debuted, with 340,000 and 335,000 downloads on iOS and Android respectively in their best five-day period in February, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app easily surpassed them with 480,000 installs in the first five days after its US launch, when the app was only available for iOS.
Compared to Bing and Edge iOS downloads alone, ChatGPT was even further ahead with its 480,000 installs versus Bing’s 250,000 and Edge’s 195,000.
Image Credits: data.ai
However, Bing and Edge were still ahead of ChatGPT when looking at all US downloads in May across both app stores, but not when comparing just iOS installs for the month. That indicates that ChatGPT may soon surpass these search-oriented alternatives.
Image Credits: data.ai
Image Credits: data.ai
Data.ai’s analysis also found that the app outperformed other top AI chatbot apps in the US, many of which were generically named to capitalize on consumer searches for keywords like “AI” and “chatbot in the App Store. Here, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was in the top five downloads, compared to the best five-day periods of other apps in 2023 on the App Store and Google Play.
The only app to surpass it was “Chat with Ask AI,” which saw 590,000 installs from April 4 to 8, 2023, compared to ChatGPT’s 480,000 installs from May 18 to 22, the data shows.
Image Credits: data.ai
While it’s only been available for a week, ChatGPT is also already in the top five AI chatbot apps by downloads in the US in May 2023. At the time of data.ai’s grade analysis, it compared ChatGPT and other top chatbot apps. apps for the month of May (through May 23rd), so technically less than a week since ChatGPT launched.
By then, the app had seen 550,000 downloads, equaling Genie – AI Chatbot, the next closest AI chatbot app to May downloads on the US App Store. However, a few others were further ahead, including ChatOn – AI Chat Bot Assistant (610,000 installs), AI Chatbot – Nova (680,000 installs), and Chat with Ask AI (1.4 million installs). But given how quickly ChatGPT managed to surpass half a million installs, it could soon beat these rivals.
Image Credits: data.ai
In addition, ChatGPT had one of the best new app debuts this year – finding data.ai in 2022.
In ChatGPT’s first five days of US iOS downloads after launch, it generated 480,000 installs, ranking it as the No. 2 biggest app launch, after Truth Social, which saw 630,000 downloads. The next biggest debuts (i.e. the first five days after launch) included the arrival of Widgetable: Lock Screen Widget in March 2023 (360,000 installs) and the 2022 launches of MyNBA2K23 (310,000 installs) and sendit — Q&A on Instagram ( 260,000 installs).
This also placed ChatGPT above the 99.99th percentile for new app launches in the US since 2022 on iOS.
Data.ai notes that only the top 1% of apps generated more than 10,600 US downloads in the first five days, and the top 0.1% more than 45,000. The analysis included data for about 39,000 apps that have launched in the US on iOS since the beginning of 2022 and then topped the charts at some point during this period. (The data does not include Apple’s first-party apps, such as Apple Music Classical).
Image Credits: data.ai
Of course, installs are just one way to measure consumer demand and aren’t as reliable as analyzing how many people subsequently signed up and became active app users.
However, because ChatGPT is still so new, data.ai doesn’t yet have accurate estimates of metrics like daily or monthly active users, it says – that could take a few more weeks to generate.
