Microsoft has been riding the ChatGPT wave for a few weeks now. Last week I looked at downloads of the official Bing app, which rose a lot when the integration with ChatGPT went live, but it wasn't the only app to gain momentum from this rollout.
Edge, Microsoft's web browser that competes with Chrome and Firefox, also saw a nice nudge. And when I say nice, I mean the highest day of downloads this year.
Edge has been averaging a little under 50K downloads per day so far this year. On the 15th, downloads in the App Store jumped to 170K and the next day they rose a bit more to 180K. Nearly 350% higher than the daily average.
The trend declined right after, much like the trend Bing saw, but is still higher than average.
Edge has been on a big growth spurt over the last few years. When I analyzed mobile browsers in 2021 it was waaaay behind. All the way behind, pretty much. But in 2022 that changed and Edge jumped to the top of the list, skipping ahead of Firefox, Brave, and Opera.
There are many reasons to switch away from native Safari and AI is certainly a good one to add to the list. I haven't found those yet so I'm sticking with native, but I believe we'll see demand for 3rd party browsers on the rise in 2023 as search morphs beyond links and paid ads.
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