Although ChatGPT is the king of AI, the race itself is far from over, and the one that seems to be winning currently is Grok.
Grok and Claude are the most similar platforms in my mind to rival ChatGPT. Sure, there's Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta, and others, but Grok and Claude are the ones I hear about the most from non-tech friends. Well, mostly Grok and not Claude, and the numbers confirm it.
According to our estimates, Grok's mobile revenue rose 400% between Q1 and Q3, leading to 18.5M of net revenue in Q3. That's an incredible amount of growth for an app that launched in February, was technically available already within the X app, and wasn't even available on Android until a few months ago.
You could say it's politics that's propelling the growth, but I've looked at it enough to know it's also the features. Especially the generative side (Imagine), which contributed to revenue nearly doubling over the summer.
We saw that in September with Gemini, which delivered the best month of revenue for the app. Smaller overall at $1.3M estimated net revenue on the App Store, but its biggest since launch.
Claude doesn't have that... Anthropic's focus on software development is great, and updates to the agent have made Claude one of the funnest agents to talk to, but will its lack of generative AI hinder its adoption by the masses?
Only time will tell.
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
Wall Street bet $2 billion on Polymarket, and downloads surged 1,172% in December. The prediction market banned in 2022 is now where Wall Street looks for signals.