ChatGPT’s new app comes out of the gate hot, tops half a million installs in first 6 days

OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is off to a great start, despite being US- and iOS-only ahead of today’s expansion to 11 more global markets. According to a new analysis by app intelligence provider data.ai, the app has already crossed half a million downloads in the first six days since its launch. It ranks as one of the best-performing new apps both this year and last, topped only by the February 2022 arrival of Trump-backed Twitter clone, Truth Social.

As consumer demand for AI chatbots has increased, other third-party apps calling themselves “ChatGPT” or “AI chatbots” have filled the App Store. While many of these were essentially fleeceware, trying to get consumers to pay expensive subscriptions to access their AI, a combined group of top apps still managed to pull in millions in consumer spending. This competitive landscape among AI chatbot apps could create a tough market for an official ChatGPT app to gain traction. But as it turned out, it was not so.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT app outperformed most of its competitors, including Microsoft’s apps Bing and Edge, along with other popular AI and chatbot apps, which made some of the first significant third-party integrations of OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology. offered.

While Bing and Microsoft Edge certainly benefited from the interest in ChatGPT in its debut, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app easily topped them, seeing respective 340K and 335K downloads on iOS and Android in its best-ever five-day period in February. 480,000 installs in the first place. Five days after its US launch, when the app was only for iOS.

In comparing Bing and Edge’s iOS downloads alone, ChatGPT was even further ahead with its 480K installs compared to Bing’s 250K and Edge’s 195K.

Image Credits: data.ai

However, Bing and Edge were still ahead of ChatGPT when looking at all US downloads across both app stores in May — but not when comparing only iOS installs for the month. This indicates that ChatGPT may soon overtake these search-focused alternatives.

Image credits, top and bottom: data.ai

Data.ai’s analysis also found that the app outperformed the other top AI chatbot apps in the US, many of which were generic to capitalize on consumer searches for keywords such as “AI” and “chatbot” on the App Store. was formally named. Here, OpenAI’s ChatGPT finds itself in the top five in terms of downloads, compared to the best five-day period for other apps in 2023 on the App Store and Google Play.

The only app to beat it was “Chat with Ask AI”, which saw 590,000 installs from April 4–8, 2023, compared to ChatGPT’s 480,000 installs from May 18–22, the data indicates.

Image Credits: data.ai

Although it’s only been available for a week, ChatGPT is already ranking in the top five among AI chatbot apps by downloads in the US in May 2023. From the month of May until the 23rd — so, technically, less than a week since ChatGPT launched.

By then, the app had seen 550,000 downloads, tying with Genie – an AI chatbot, the next closest ranked AI chatbot app by May downloads on the US App Store. However, some others were ahead, including ChatOn – AI Chat Bot Assistant (610K installs), AI Chatbot – Nova (680K installs), and Chat with Ask AI (1.4M installs). Still, given how quickly ChatGPT was able to hit half a million installs, it may soon beat these rivals.

Image Credits: data.ai

Plus, ChatGPT had one of the coolest new app debuts this year — and in 2022, data.ai’s got it.

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 behind TruthSocial, which saw 630,000 downloads. The next biggest launches (i.e., the first 5 days after launch) include Widgetable: Lock Screen Widget (360,000 installs) in March 2023, and the 2022 launch of MyNBA2K23 (310,000 installs) and Sendit – Q&A on Instagram (260,000 installs) ).

This placed ChatGPT in the 99.99th percentile for new apps launched in the US from 2022 on iOS.

Data.ai notes that only the top 1% of apps generated more than 10,600 US downloads in their first five days, and the top 0.1% generated more than 45,000 downloads. Its analysis included data from nearly 39,000 apps that launched on iOS in the US since the beginning of 2022 and then ranked in the top charts at some point in the period. (The data does not include Apple’s first-party apps, such as Apple Music Classical).

Image Credits: data.ai

Of course, installs are only one way to measure consumer demand and are not as reliable as analyzing how many people signed up and became active app users.

However, since ChatGPT is still very new, data.ai won’t yet have accurate estimates on metrics like daily or monthly active users, it says — it could take a few more weeks to generate that.