The AI Study Helper That's Riding the Back-to-School Wave

There's a set of apps that rise at the end of August and the beginning of September - back to school season - adding millions of new downloads (and dollars) for their developers. ClassDojo is one of those.

This year, however, there's another set of apps that's in demand - AI study apps (aka. homework busters). Gauth is the most downloaded right now.

Gauth is currently the 3rd most downloaded app in the US App Store, above TikTok, Gmail, Whatsapp, and other household names. It's also ranked 8th on Google Play above Facebook.

Using the app, a student captures a picture of a math problem and Gauth's AI solves it. The service also offers live tutors for more complex problems, or for deeper help with math problems.

Why even pretend to learn math if you're just going to use AI to solve all your problems? That philosophical question isn't very relevant because our App Intelligence shows Gauth was downloaded 1.5M times last week.

That's 147 downloads every second - 10K downloads by the time you finish reading this insight.

It's important to note that last week was Gauth's biggest week of downloads since it was released back in 2020 and had a great few months of downloads back in 2021 that came close, but weren't as high as last week's downloads.

Gauth's rise started at the beginning of June but has been very strong for much of 2024 when compared to 2023.

Google Play leads in downloads where the Philippines, Indonesia, and Brazil are the top markets. A very different list compared to the App Store's, which has the US, UK, and Vietnam at the top.

I can totally see why students would want a companion, but I also attribute Gauth's success to its strong Apple Search Ads campaign. Our Search Ads insights show 1,700 unique keywords in the US alone, most of which are very popular and Gauth commands the highest share of impressions.

What About Revenue?

All those downloads also led to revenue.

According to our estimates, Gauth brought in $2.3M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play since the beginning of the year, $200K of which in August. Less than a third of what its closest competitor, Mathway, brought in at the same time ($772K), so there's a lot more room to grow.

AI will find its way into more day-to-day experiences. If you're in this space or want to get into it keep an eye out for our upcoming market report on AI.