OpenAI’s (OPENAI) ChatGPT mobile app growth may have hit its peak, TechCrunch reported, citing a new analysis of download trends and daily active users provided by Apptopia.
Its estimates suggest that new user growth, measured by percentage changes in new global downloads, slowed after April. Global daily active user growth also stopped and plateaued in more recent weeks, the report added.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
The firm analyzed global daily active user, or DAU, growth and found that the numbers have started to even out over the past month or so, according to the report.
October is only half over, but the firm noted that it is on track to decline 8.1% in terms of a month-over-month percentage change in global downloads, the report added.
The report noted that the analysis was about download growth not total downloads. In terms of number of new installs, ChatGPT’s mobile app is still doing well, with millions of downloads per day, the report added.
Other metrics suggest that average time spent per DAU in the U.S., has declined 22.5% since July, and average sessions per DAU in the U.S. have also fallen by 20.7%.
This suggests that U.S. users are spending less time in ChatGPT’s app and are opening it fewer times per day. User churn in the U.S. has also declined and stabilized during this time, suggesting that the app is now retaining its core users and seeing fewer who just drop in briefly to experiment, then leave the app, the report noted.
Besides simply reaching its peak, there could be other factors that may have caused this. This includes competition from Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google’s Gemini, and user engagement changes following an April update that was aimed at making the chatbot’s AI model less sycophantic. This continued with the August release of GPT-5, which was said to be less personable, the report added.
Apptopia noted that ChatGPT’s average time spent per DAU and average sessions per DAU metrics were trending lower before the sharp rise of its rival Gemini, which raced to the top of the charts in September thanks to the release of Google’s new AI image model, Nano Banana, the report noted.
Gemini’s growth could have influenced some of the more recent decline in ChatGPT’s core metrics, but it does not explain the overall trend, according to the report.
In addition, Apptopia noted that if only average time spent per DAU was declining, but not average sessions per DAU, it could have suggested that people were getting more efficient with their ChatGPT queries. But since both are on the decline, that is not the case.
Apptopia said that it is possible that the experimentation phase with the ChatGPT app is over, and now it is becoming a part of users’ daily routines. People are likely using the app when they need it or remember to use it, versus the increased use it saw when it was still new, the report added.