Does Anyone Need an AI Browser? Arc Goes into the Ice Box...

A few days ago The Browser Company announced it's putting Arc, the AI browser they released just a few months ago, into maintenance mode so they can focus on a new browser.

The announcement surprised a decent number of my X stream, but having followed Arc since its underwhelming release in January, I'm not very surprised.

Last time I looked at Arc, back in early March, it already amassed close to a half million downloads in roughly a month on the App Store. Things looked good, and there was a lot of good will on social media towards the company, which was very open and responsive.

I personally found the app a bit too confusing for my needs, enough to not be a daily user, but that's the nature of being (r)evolutionary, right? Maybe?

Well, we're about 8 months later now and Arc's total downloads, according to our App Intelligence, sit at 1.4M. Those are App Store downloads, where the app was launched initially. An Android version launched on Google Play a few months ago, but the numbers there are small enough to not be relevant to where I'm going with this analysis.

Looking at the trend, it's very obvious the excitement is all but gone, and that's been the case fairly early into the rollout.

Daily downloads peaked at 48K in early February for just a single day, but very quickly declined to an average of under 10% for a few weeks, around 4K, which then dropped down to around 2.5K since early July.

Last week, daily downloads dropped to around 1.5K, according to our estimates.

So when Josh, the CEO, announced they're moving on to a new browser, I wasn't at all surprised. ASO and paid advertising could have certainly helped Arc's numbers, but the main challenge is competing with a built-in browser (Safari) and the world's most popular browser (Chrome) with a browser that is simply too complicated for most people.

While adding "AI" to apps these days seems to make them more exciting, something as core as a browser requires more than just a keyword to convert existing users of incumbents, and I hope that's what the new browser will be - combining the good from Arc with a simplified version of the complicated.

I don't think the market needs another browser, but without new entrants there will be no innovation, so I salute the team at The Browser Company for taking on giants to improve the experience.