ChatGPT’s mobile app is seeing slowing download growth and daily use, analysis shows

ChatGPT’s mobile app growth may have peaked, according to new analysis of download trends and daily active users provided by third-party app intelligence Apptopia. The estimates indicate that new user growth, as measured by percentage changes in new global downloads, slowed after April. Additionally, global growth in daily active users has stalled and leveled off in recent weeks.

The company looked at global daily active user (DAU) growth and found that the numbers started to level out over the past month.

Although October is only half over, the company says it’s on track to decline 8.1% in terms of a month-over-month percentage change in global download numbers.

To be clear, this is a look at downloading grownot total downloads. In terms of sheer number of new installs, ChatGPT’s mobile app is still going strong, with millions of downloads per day.

However, if you see download growth stalling, it could indicate that an app’s overall growth rate is slowing. In the case of ChatGPT, increased competition and changes in the characteristics of the AI ​​model could be the cause.

Digging deeper, other figures show that average time spent per DAU in the US has fallen by 22.5% since July, and average sessions per DAU in the US have also fallen by 20.7%.

This indicates that US users are spending less time in the ChatGPT app and opening it fewer times per day. User churn in the US has also fallen and stabilized during this period, indicating that the app is now retaining its core users and seeing fewer who stop by to experiment and then abandon the app.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Besides simply reaching his peak, there are other factors that could have played a role here. That includes not only competition from Google’s Gemini, but also changes to user engagement following an April update designed for that make the chatbot AI model less sycophantic. This continued with the release of GPT-5 in August, which was rumored to be the case less handsomealso.

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 to the top charts in September thanks to the release of Google’s new AI imaging model, Nano Banana.

So while Gemini’s growth may have influenced some of the more 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 per DAU decreased, but not the average sessions per DAU, it could have indicated that people were becoming more efficient with their ChatGPT searches. But since both are in decline, that is not the case.

Instead, Apptopia says it’s possible that the experimentation phase with the ChatGPT app is over and it will now become part of users’ daily routines. People are likely to use the app when they need it or forget to use it, compared to increased usage when it was new.

For OpenAI, this means the company will have to invest in app marketing or release new features to improve some of these core metrics again, just as other established mobile apps have to do. It can no longer rely solely on newness to deliver growth.