ChatGPT’s mobile app growth may have reached its peak, according to a fresh analysis of download trends and daily energetic users provided by a third-party app analytics company. Apptopia. His estimates show that fresh user growth, as measured by percentage changes in fresh downloads worldwide, slowed after April.
The company looked at global daily energetic user (DAU) growth and found that the numbers have started to level off over the past month.
Even though we’re only halfway through October, the company says the rate of decline in global downloads is 8.1% month-over-month.
To be clear, this is a look at downloading, not downloading. In terms of sheer number of fresh installs, the ChatGPT mobile app continues to perform well, with millions of downloads daily.
However, seeing a slowdown in download growth may suggest that the app’s overall growth rate is slowing. In the case of ChatGPT, the reason may be increased competition and changes in the characteristics of the AI model.
Digging deeper, other metrics show that the average time spent specifically on DAU in the US has dropped by 22.5% since July, and the average number of sessions per DAU in the US has also dropped by 20.7%.
This means US users spend less time in the ChatGPT app and open it fewer times per day. During this time, user churn in the U.S. has also declined and plateaued, indicating that the app is now retaining its core users and fewer users who simply drop in to experiment and then abandon the app.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond just reaching the top, there are other factors that may have played a role. This includes not only competition from Google Gemini, but also changes in user engagement following the April update that was supposed to enable this make the chatbot AI model less flattering. This continued with the August release of GPT-5 which was said to be the case less handsomealso.
However, Apptopia notes that ChatGPT’s average time spent per DAU and average sessions per DAU trended downward before a acute augment for competitor Google Gemini, which climbed to the top of the charts in September with the release of Google’s fresh AI image model, Nano Banana.
So while Gemini’s development may have had an impact on some of the recent declines in ChatGPT’s core metrics, it doesn’t explain the overall trend, the company says.
Additionally, Apptopia points out that if only the average time spent per DAU decreased, but not the average number of sessions per DAU, it could suggest that people would be more capable with ChatGPT queries. But since both are failing, this is not the case.
Instead, Apptopia says it’s possible that the ChatGPT app’s experimentation phase has ended and it’s now becoming part of users’ daily activities. People are likely to exploit the app when they need it or remember to exploit it, compared to increased exploit when it was still fresh.
In the case of OpenAI, this means the company will need to invest in app marketing or provide fresh features for it to improve some of these core metrics again, just as other established mobile apps must do. It can no longer rely solely on newness to deliver growth.