Meta’s Muse Hits 10M Downloads in 40 Days — Leaking User Data Along the Way
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Meta’s Muse app has not only joined the elite ranks of apps to reach 10 million US downloads in 40 days, it is also outperforming its competitors when it comes to user retention, according to a new report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower (via 9to5Mac).
Meta Muse’s user footprint continues to grow, despite mounting concerns about privacy. The growth is thanks in part to a massive ad push by Meta that’s clearly driving the app’s popularity. The report says the app accounted for 39% of Meta’s advertising spend in the US so far this month, up from 23% in September.
The app spent 12 consecutive days at the top of the US App Store charts before sliding to second place. On September 30, the app reached the 5 million US download threshold, passing that milestone much faster than ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude, which Sensor Tower says took 56, 103, and 492 days, respectively.
Sensor Tower now says Muse has become just the 12th app to reach the 10 million US download milestone within 40 days. The firm began tracking such numbers in October 2015. In comparison, ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude reached much lower user levels in their first 40 days of availability, with just 3.7 million, 500,000, and 200,000 US downloads, respectively.
Per Sensor Tower data, ChatGPT scaled to ~15mn global downloads in its first 40 days post app-launch, as its global reach expedited its growth. ChatGPT’s top regions by downloads during the studied period included the US, Japan, Brazil, and Germany, which accounted for 25%, 9%, 6%, and 5% of the global downloads, respectively.
The report also shows that ChatGPT has seen its US download numbers decline 25% over the past 30 days, when compared to the previous 30-day period. Those numbers are still good enough to make it currently the fourth most downloaded free app on the US App Store. Meanwhile, Claude sits in seventh place and Grok in 34th.
While Sensor Tower did not provide a comprehensive list of the 11 other apps that reached 10 million US downloads in just 40 days, it did note that nine of them were mobile games. Another Meta app, the social networking platform Threads, was the last non-game app to achieve the feat back in July 2023, while the other non-game was almost certainly Disney+, which hit that number roughly two weeks after the streaming service launched in November 2019.
Gains Fly in the Face of Security Concerns
Muse’s success comes even as privacy concerns are being raised about the platform. Ars Technica recently reported that security researchers have discovered that shared conversations in the app could expose sensitive information of both the personal and business kinds. Meta has temporarily turned off the sharing feature while the issue is being investigated.
Muse, as well as numerous other online services, allows users to share their searches, images, conversations, and other content with others. Sharing creates a unique URL that anyone can click to load the page containing their shared content. To keep the information from being accessed by anyone without the actual link, the URLs usually contain a long bit of text that could not be easily guessed.
However, researchers from security firm Claroc said they discovered that a central design decision in how Muse constructs shareable URLs — placing chat titles directly into domain hostnames logged by public DNS records — made the links shockingly easy to uncover.
They were able to determine 6,800 links that Muse users had created for sharing conversations with others. After opening just a few hundred of these links, they found information their creators clearly did not intend to share with the public, including:
- A small-business owner’s loan application, including the amount requested
- A to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
- A workplace’s full-year staff vacation calendar
- A national marketing company’s internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
This is just a small sampling of the information they uncovered.
“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”
The security company’s blog entry goes into more detail for interested parties.
Even as security researchers raise concerns about Muse’s privacy protections — or lack thereof — the app continues to outperform its competitors when it comes to holding on to the users it has attracted.
US Muse users keep returning to the app, with a current average retention rate of 30% after 7 days and 23% after 14 days, outpacing AI competitors in retention at the 7- and 14-day marks. ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok averaged a 19% 7-day and 16% 14-day retention rate.
