Meta's Muse AI Agent Hits No. 2 on US App Store With 83,000 iOS Downloads

Meta's new AI agent app, Muse, has climbed to the No. 2 position on the US App Store's Top Charts, according to data provided by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The app has surpassed 83,000 iOS downloads in the United States since its launch on Tuesday.

Muse is currently limited to the US market and is also accessible via the web and WhatsApp, though downloads through those channels aren't reflected in Sensor Tower's iOS-specific figures. On Android, the app is performing significantly worse, ranking No. 338 in Google Play's Productivity category. Android download numbers aren't yet available.

How Muse compares to Meta's past launches

Muse's debut pales next to Meta's own app history. Threads pulled in more than 4.3 million US downloads on its launch day in 2023. The Meta AI app, launched separately, saw 108,000 US downloads on day one — already ahead of Muse's multi-day total.

The comparison to ChatGPT is also unfavorable for Muse. OpenAI's chatbot topped half a million US installs in under a week after its release, when the US was also its only market. Divided evenly across that period, ChatGPT averaged roughly 83,300 downloads per day — a rate Muse has taken twice as long to match.

Muse did move up the charts over its first few days, rising from No. 4 on Wednesday to No. 2 as of Thursday, suggesting the app is gaining traction rather than losing it.

The competitive field: Muse vs. Instinct

Meta faces competition in consumer agentic AI from multiple directions, including Google's Gemini Spark and Anthropic's Claude Cowork. But the most direct rival for mainstream, easy-to-use agents appears to be Instinct, a text-message-based AI agent recently valued at $2.5 billion with $350 million in funding.

Instinct has been shipping features rapidly: it rolled out email addresses for all users this week and announced a social-networking layer that lets one person's agent communicate directly with a friend's agent to coordinate plans. The company has also launched integrations with Stripe and 1Password, plus a location-sharing feature that lets the agent act on real-time location data.

Meta's approach requires users to hand over more personal information than Instinct's model — a request that arrives awkwardly. Muse launched just days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over lawsuits tied to social media's consumer harms, adding to a long history of FTC privacy fines and data scandals.

What this means

Muse's early numbers aren't a failure, but they aren't a breakout either. A No. 2 App Store ranking with roughly 83,000 downloads signals genuine curiosity, not the kind of viral adoption Meta saw with Threads or that OpenAI saw with ChatGPT. The weak Android performance (No. 338 in Productivity) is a bigger concern given Android's larger US install base for utility apps.

The real story is strategic positioning: Meta is betting that task-completing agents, not chatbots or social feeds, define the next phase of consumer AI. That bet now runs directly into Instinct, a well-funded competitor building a social graph based on real-world contacts and messaging habits — potentially a more valuable dataset than Meta's follow-based graph. Meta's trust deficit, reinforced by its $18 billion settlement, may prove a bigger obstacle to Muse's growth than any product feature gap.