ChatGPT Joins the App Wars

You didn't realize there was an app war going on? It's not official, but it's always there in the background. Usually, it's social media apps going against each other for the top slot, but it appears that ChatGPT is making its way into the war.


We won't cover every app, but we'll give you some cool highlights.

To start with, app downloads were down overall in November. Maybe people were busy gearing up for holiday shopping and digesting their Thanksgiving meal. All those leftovers can take a toll on us, right? You can only eat so many turkey sandwiches.

Despite the slowdown in app downloads, the apps that always dominate the charts still did what they did. They dominated the charts. These, of course, are the social media apps.

A quick look at the iOS App Store and Google Play shows TikTok coming in at number one, with a combined total download of 49M. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat also scored the top 10, right alongside Temu and CapCut, which made it to the top three in the iOS App Store.

Instagram tied TikTok in combined downloads, with Facebook clocking in at 39M and WhatsApp snagging 34M. Snapchat did make the top ten, but it trailed the pack with 24M downloads.

YouTube, Gmail, Telegram, Google, and Google Maps are other apps that made it on one list or the other, though not necessarily with flying colors.

Here's the big news. For the first time, ChatGPT has entered the app wars arena.

Okay, compared to the other apps in the top ten, it isn't that impressive, with 19M downloads, but it's there. The app has managed to grace the iOS App Store charts a couple of times since its release, but it never really hung around long enough to make a splash in the overall ratings. All that seems to be changing for the AI giant.

On a side note, ChatGPT has temporarily closed the doors on paid subscriptions, blaming the move on the difficulty of scaling. Not being able to keep up with demand lost them some big money, so there's that.

So, there are a couple of apps surprisingly missing in action. If you're one of those slick people who noticed, you might be scratching your head. Where's X? Elon's free-speech project wasn't on the list on either platform. He can't be too happy about that. Threads was also absent, so at least Elon is in good company.

Summing it up, the 10 most downloaded mobile apps for November totaled 313M globally when both platforms were combined. That's a lot of mobile app action.

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