ChatGPT on Android Hits 1 Million Downloads in Just 1 Day, Beats the 230k on iOS at Launch

The AI assistant appears to be maintaining its popularity.

The Google Play store today shows the ChatGPT Android app with more than 1 million downloads. It launched yesterday.

You may say, “Well, that’s nothing compared to 40 million Threads app downloads on its first day.” True! But, you may want to consider that it took the ChatGPT iOS app six days to reach 500k downloads. Over three weeks, that grew to 5 million downloads. The Android app appears to have a download velocity four times faster than the iOS app in the first 24 hours.

The ChatGPT Moment Lives On

The claims that ChatGPT is losing its luster among users may be overstated. Much was made of the SimilarWeb report showing ChatGPT’s website traffic decline between May and June. Get ready for another fall in ChatGPT web traffic. SimilarWeb data does not include mobile app use.

Synthedia assessed the report of web traffic decline and noted it coincided with the introduction of the iOS app, the conclusion of higher education semesters, the end of many primary education school years, and the start of the summer vacation period in the northern hemisphere. Don’t be surprised if you see another round of stories suggesting ChatGPT is losing popularity as Android users opt for the app over the browser, and a large group of people misinterpret the data.

There was clearly more pent-up demand for the app among Android users, and the later launch also suggests the application has staying power. ChatGPT also has over 8k app ratings already. iOS has been around two months longer, has many more downloads, and just 11k ratings. Today's ratings are 4.4 stars on iOS and 4.3 stars on Google Play. It appears that most of the 1-star reviews on Android are the result of login issues.

Details

The Android app has rolled out initially in four countries, including the U.S., India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. OpenAI’s iOS app also followed a limited roll-out but is now available in at least 46 countries.

The features appear to be identical. OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition enables speech input as well as typing. ChatGPT Plus Subscribers can use both the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models. Free users only have access to the 3.5 model. You can also name your conversations for easier identification later, opt out of any personalization and forgo the app’s memory, and share your conversation thread with other apps and devices.

I still see the desktop app as far easier to use, but this is a good option when you are on the go. It is also a signal that ChatGPT’s popularity remains strong, despite the waning of the novelty effect, summer break, and a number of new competitors.