ChatGPT’s mobile app growth may have hit its peak, according to a new analysis of download trends and daily active users provided by the third-party app intelligence firm Apptopia. Its estimates indicate that new user growth, measured by percentage changes in new global downloads, slowed after April.
The firm looked at the global daily active user (DAU) growth and found that the numbers have begun to even out over the past month or so.
Although October is only half over, the firm says it’s on pace to be down 8.1% in terms of a month-over-month percentage change in global downloads.
To be clear, this is a look at download growth, not total downloads. In terms of sheer number of new installs, ChatGPT’s mobile app is still doing well, with millions of downloads per day.
However, seeing the download growth stall can suggest that an app’s overall pace of growth is slowing. In ChatGPT’s case, increased competition and changes to its AI model’s characteristics could be to blame.
Diving in deeper, other metrics indicate that average time spent per DAU in the U.S., specifically, has dropped 22.5% since July, and average sessions per DAU in the U.S. are also down by 20.7%.
This indicates 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 dropped and stabilized during this time, indicating that the app is now retaining its core users and seeing fewer who just drop by briefly to experiment, then abandon the app.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond simply reaching its peak, there are other factors that could have played a role here. That includes not only competition from Google’s Gemini, but also user engagement changes following an April update that was designed to make the chatbot’s AI model less sycophantic. This continued with the August release of GPT-5, which was said to be less personable, as well.
However, Apptopia notes that ChatGPT’s average time spent per DAU and average sessions per DAU metrics were trending downward before the sharp rise of its competitor, Google’s Gemini, which shot up to the top charts in September thanks to the release of Google’s new AI image model, Nano Banana.
So while Gemini’s growth may have influenced some of the more recent drops in ChatGPT’s core metrics, it doesn’t explain the overall trend, the firm says.
Plus, Apptopia points out that if only average time spent per DAU was dropping, 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’s not the case.
Instead, Apptopia says it’s possible that the experimentation phase with the ChatGPT app is over, and now it’s becoming a part of users’ daily routines. People are likely using the app when they need it or remember to use it, as compared with the increased use it saw when it was still new.
For OpenAI, that means the company will have to invest in app marketing or release new features for it to boost some of these core metrics again, just as other established mobile apps have to do. It can no longer rely on novelty alone to provide growth.
