ChatGPT’s mobile app growth may have peaked, according to a new analysis of download trends and daily active users provided by third-party app intelligence Apptopia. Its estimates show that new user growth, measured by percentage changes in new global downloads, slowed after April.
The company looked at global daily active user (DAU) growth and found that the numbers started to level off in the last month or so.
Although October is only half over, the company says it’s down 8.1% in month-over-month percentage change in global downloads.
To be clear, this is a look at the download developmentNo total downloads. In terms of the sheer number of new installs, ChatGPT’s mobile app is still doing well, with millions of downloads per day.
However, a halt in download growth may indicate that an app’s overall growth rate is slowing down. In ChatGPT’s case, increased competition and changes in AI model features could be to blame.
Digging deeper, other metrics show that average time spent per DAU in the US, specifically, is down 22.5% since July, and average sessions per DAU in the US are also down 20.7%.
This shows that US users spend less time on the ChatGPT app and open it less times per day. User churn in the US has also decreased and stabilized over this period, indicating that the app is now retaining its core users and seeing fewer who just drop by for a while to experiment and then leave.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond just reaching his peak, there are other factors that could be at play here. This includes not only competition from Google’s Gemini, but also user engagement changes following an April update designed to makes the chatbot AI model less slanderous. This continued with the release of GPT-5 in August, which was said to be less personalityalso.
However, Apptopia notes that ChatGPT’s average time spent per DAU and average sessions per DAU metrics were trending downwards before the sharp rise of its competitor, Google’s Gemini, which climbed 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 key metrics, it doesn’t explain the overall trend, the company says.
Additionally, Apptopia points out that if only the average time spent per DAU was decreasing, but not the average sessions per DAU, it could indicate that people were becoming more efficient with their ChatGPT queries. But since both are in decline, this is not the case.
Instead, Apptopia says it’s likely that the experimentation phase with the ChatGPT app is over and will now become part of users’ daily routine. People are likely to use the app when they need it or remember to use it, compared to the increased usage they saw when it was new.
For OpenAI, that means the company will have to invest in app marketing or release new features to boost some of those key metrics again, just like other established mobile apps have to. It can no longer rely on innovation alone to deliver growth.
