Google Gemini Finally Comes to the App Store - Can it Catch Up ChatGPT?

Google has finally released Gemini, its ChatGPT competitor, as a standalone app on the App Store and I'm very curious to see if it can do what Claude didn't and catch up to ChatGPT.

Even though we're talking about Google here, catching up with ChatGPT is a tall order considering it's currently responsible for roughly half of the revenue of the top 1,000 AI apps on the App Store and Google Play!

That's a little tease from a new AI report we'll be publishing very soon.

Gemini was released to Google Play back in February, and our estimates show that it was downloaded 64M times since. That's quite a few downloads, but... ChatGPT's Android app was downloaded 130M times in the same period. And ChatGPT isn't even new!

Will Gemini face the same reception on the App Store?

Google Gemini launched on the App Store almost a month ago, and since its release, saw 4.5M downloads, according to Appfigures Intelligence. It peaked at 250K daily downloads, about 25K downloads shy of the initial peak of the Android release.

The downloads are primarily driven by the US, which holds the only two-digit share with 26%, followed by India, Japan, Brazil, and the UK. Those are normally countries where Android apps excel, so it's interesting to see this.

Claude, a competing language model that launched on the App Store back in May and on Google Play in June, hasn't been able to catch up to ChatGPT. Our estimates show Claude got 4M downloads since launch. Less than what Gemini saw in its first month.

But back to the big question - has Gemini caught up to ChatGPT?

Our App Intelligence shows the answer is very clear, and unfortunately for Google the results aren't even close. ChatGPT saw 10M downloads from the App Store since Gemini went live last month - more than twice as many.

Why? Claude and Gemini are doing a poor job with their App Store presence. That might sound harsh but it's true. "Claude by Anthropic" and "Google Gemini" don't describe what these things do + they don't tell the search algorithm where to rank the app. ChatGPT doesn't do that either, but it managed to capture enough brand recognition that it doesn't need it as much. The newcomers do.

Many 3rd party AI apps get more downloads and earn more money than Claude on the App Store and Google Play every day for the same reason. Crazy, right?