Meta's New Agent Muse Reaches Second Spot on US App Store

Meta has pushed its standalone agentic AI software, Muse, to the second overall spot on the United States iOS App Store following its midweek launch. The application, which acts as an autonomous assistant designed to execute tasks on behalf of users, is currently available exclusively to American consumers.

Early adoption data from market intelligence tracker Sensor Tower reveals that Muse has accumulated more than 83,000 downloads on Apple devices in the US, according to a report by TechCrunch. While the software climbed from fourth place on Wednesday to second place by Thursday, its opening trajectory trails several of Meta's prior rollouts. Threads generated over 4.3 million domestic installs on its first day, while the standalone Meta AI application logged 108,000 downloads during its initial debut.

Muse also lags behind the historic early benchmark set by OpenAI's ChatGPT app, which crossed 500,000 US downloads in less than seven days, averaging roughly 83,300 installs each day. Performance on Android has been significantly more muted, where Muse sits at rank 338 within the Productivity section on Google Play. Those numbers exclude usage across the web and WhatsApp, where Meta has also integrated the agent.

The Battle for Consumer Agents

The launch represents a central pillar of Meta's long-term pivot toward autonomous consumer agents. Rather than simply serving conversational answers, agentic systems are engineered to take real-world actions, coordinate schedules, and execute complex workflows across external software tools.

Competition in the segment is intensifying rapidly. Beside enterprise-focused offerings like Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Google's Gemini Spark, consumer-first startups are gaining substantial traction. Leading rival Instinct, a text-based AI agent valued at $2.5 billion with $350 million in capital, recently launched user email addresses, integrations with Stripe and 1Password, and multi-agent coordination capabilities that let separate assistants plan events together.

Why it matters: Converting mainstream audiences to agentic software requires immense trust, as these systems demand broad access to personal data, passwords, and calendar feeds to function effectively. For Meta, launching an autonomous agent immediately following an $18 billion legal settlement over consumer safety highlights the delicate balance between expanding AI capabilities and overcoming ongoing consumer privacy skepticism.