Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, reached the No. 2 spot on the US App Store just two days after launching on September 8. That sounds like a home run until you compare its 83,000 downloads to what Meta’s other apps, and rivals like ChatGPT, pulled off on their own opening weekends.
Rankings lie a little. Not on purpose, just by nature. A No. 2 spot on the App Store tells you Muse beat almost everything else released that week. It doesn’t tell you how big the actual number underneath that ranking was.
So here’s the number: 83,000 iOS downloads in the US in Muse’s first two days. Good enough for second place on the Top Charts. Not quite as good on Google Play, where Muse sat at #338 in the Productivity category, a rank that barely registers next to the App Store showing.
Muse is Meta’s attempt at an AI agent, a tool meant to actually do tasks for you rather than just answer questions. It’s the company’s clearest bet yet that agentic AI, not chatbots, is where consumer AI is headed next. It launched on iOS, the web, and inside WhatsApp, though only the standalone app counts toward store rankings.
How that stacks up against Meta’s own history
Context matters here, and Meta has a lot of context to compare against. Threads pulled in 4.3 million US downloads on day one. The original Meta AI app landed 108,000 US downloads at launch. Muse’s 83,000 over two days doesn’t touch either of those numbers.
It also lags a very direct point of comparison: ChatGPT, when it relaunched its own app push, drew more than 500,000 US installs in under a week, averaging around 83,300 downloads a day. Muse pulled in roughly that many downloads total, over 48 hours, not in a single day.
None of this means Muse flopped. A top-two App Store slot is still a top-two App Store slot, and plenty of well-funded startups would trade a great deal to get there. It just means the ranking alone oversells the launch relative to what a Meta product, or a category leader like ChatGPT, has historically managed.
The competition nobody’s talking about yet
The more interesting rival isn’t OpenAI. It’s Instinct, a text-message-based AI agent valued at $2.5 billion that’s been quietly building momentum with features Muse doesn’t obviously match yet: its own email addresses, agent-to-agent coordination between friends’ assistants, and direct integrations with Stripe and 1Password. That’s a genuinely different product shape, agents that talk to other agents on your behalf, and it’s worth watching whether Meta tries to copy that layer next.
The backdrop Meta would rather you forget
Muse also launched into some unfortunate timing. Meta is in the middle of an $18 billion multistate settlement over social media harms to children, on top of a long history of privacy actions from the FTC. None of that is about Muse specifically, but it’s the environment Meta is trying to build consumer trust for a brand-new AI product in, and that environment isn’t exactly friendly.
Bottom Line
A No. 2 App Store ranking is a real result, but it’s a result inflated by a quiet week for new app launches, not proof that Muse is winning the agentic AI race. The number to watch isn’t the rank. It’s whether that 83,000 keeps growing into month two, or fades the way most launch-week spikes do.
