Hajra Naz
Meta is starting to earn some goodwill from Wall Street. That shift follows Tuesday’s launch of its new AI app, Muse. The company’s broader push into agentic AI has also become a hot topic on X, especially among industry insiders. Now, early download numbers give us a clearer picture. They show how popular Muse actually is with its target audience: U.S. consumers.
Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, provided new data on this front. According to that data, Muse has surpassed 83,000 downloads on iOS in the United States. Right now, the app remains limited to the U.S. market only.
This download volume was enough to push Muse to No. 2 on the App Store’s Top Charts. Still, that performance looks modest next to other recent Meta app launches. Both Threads and Meta AI performed much better at debut, based on the data. Threads, for example, pulled in more than 4.3 million U.S. downloads on its very first day. Meta AI saw 108,000 U.S. downloads during its own launch.
Muse also lags behind another major consumer AI launch: ChatGPT. Within less than a week of its release, ChatGPT had already crossed half a million U.S. installs. At the time, the U.S. was also ChatGPT’s only market. Spread evenly across that week, ChatGPT averaged about 83,300 downloads per day. Muse took roughly twice as long to hit a comparable figure.
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That said, this doesn’t necessarily signal a weak launch for Muse. It may just be building momentum more gradually. The app continues climbing iOS charts. It moved from fourth place on the U.S. App Store on Wednesday. As of today, it sits at No. 2.
The picture looks different on Android, though. There, Muse has only reached No. 338 in the Productivity category on Google Play. Android-specific download figures aren’t available yet.
Muse is also accessible through the web and via WhatsApp. Neither of those access points factor into the download estimates above.
Even so, Muse’s early numbers deserve attention. The app represents one of Meta’s most significant bets right now. The company’s underlying thesis is straightforward: agents that complete tasks on people’s behalf will define the next era of consumer AI. Meta is putting real weight behind that bet, in a move arguably as bold as its earlier rebrand from Facebook to Meta, back when it chased metaverse ambitions.
Of course, Meta isn’t alone in this race. Nearly every major tech company has entered the consumer agentic AI space in some form. That includes Google’s Gemini Spark and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, among others.
But when it comes to simple, mass-market agents built for everyday use, the real competition right now sits between two products: Meta’s Muse and Instinct, a newer AI agent that operates over text messaging. Instinct was recently valued at $2.5 billion.
Despite lingering security concerns and a privacy policy widely seen as too broad, Silicon Valley insiders keep praising Instinct’s capabilities.
Plenty of other agents exist too, many focused more narrowly on things like work management or family logistics. Still, Instinct looks like the frontrunner to beat. It has $350 million in funding behind it. It’s also shipping new features at a rapid clip.
This week alone, Instinct rolled out email addresses for every user. The company also revealed plans to build its own social layer, letting a user’s Instinct agent communicate directly with their friends’ agents to help coordinate plans.
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If agentic AI really is the future, this social approach could matter a lot. Instinct is essentially building a new kind of social graph, one based on who people genuinely talk to and spend time with in real life. That could end up being more valuable than Meta’s existing friend graph, which blends real friends with people users simply follow.
In the past several days, Instinct has also added integrations with Stripe and 1Password. It introduced a location-sharing feature too, letting the agent handle tasks that depend on knowing a user’s real-time location.
Timing may have also played a role in Muse’s more modest debut. The app asks users to share more personal data with Meta than usual. It launched just days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement, tied to a lawsuit over social media’s harms to consumers.
That’s far from Meta’s only legal headache over the years. The company has weathered major data scandals in the past. It’s also faced repeated fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations.
