How ChatGPT Became a Top-Chart Fixture on the App Store

ChatGPT's iPhone app reached No. 1 on the US App Store on its second day in May 2023 and has rarely left the top 20 since. It got there on a web product people already used, and it stayed there by turning a free habit into roughly $3 billion of in-app spending within 31 months.

The launch: a web habit arrives on the phone

By the time OpenAI shipped a native iOS app in May 2023, ChatGPT had already spent six months as the fastest-growing consumer web product anyone had measured ¹⁴. The app launched in the US first, and Appfigures estimated about 81,000 iOS installs on day one on a US-plus-Canada basis, then roughly 606,000 in the first week while the app was US-only ^1,2. It hit No. 1 on the US App Store on day two ¹.

Those numbers were later used as the yardstick for every AI app launch. When Sora arrived in October 2025, Appfigures compared its 627,000 first-week installs to ChatGPT's 606,000, and noted that without Canada the Sora launch was about 96% of ChatGPT's ². Gemini's day one (80,000 iOS installs) was almost identical to ChatGPT's; Grok's was 56,000, Claude's 21,000 ¹.

Android followed in late July 2023: the Google Play listing went up on July 21 as a pre-registration page, with the download live within days (exact release day unverified) ³.

Chart positions, year by year

A top-free rank reflects install velocity, so ChatGPT's chart story is really a story about how many new people kept arriving each day, long after launch.

Two things stand out. First, ChatGPT did not make Apple's US top-10 download list for 2023 despite the launch spike, then climbed to No. 4 in 2024 on sustained daily installs ⁶. Second, the only apps that have knocked it off No. 1 in the US were other AI launches, DeepSeek and Sora, each of which fell back within weeks ^10,12. The fixture is not that ChatGPT is always No. 1; it is that the slot above it is temporary.

Revenue: the ramp that made it a Top Grossing app too

Appfigures estimates for worldwide consumer spending in the ChatGPT mobile app, across iOS and Android ⁴:

• 2023: about $42.9 million (iOS only for the first two months)
• 2024: about $487 million, up roughly 1,036%
• 2025: about $2.48 billion, up roughly 408%

The cumulative total crossed $3 billion in mid-December 2025, 31 months after launch. For comparison, TikTok took 58 months to reach the same figure, HBO Max 46 and Disney+ 42 ⁴. Sensor Tower's figure for 2025 in-app revenue is higher, $3.4 billion, which reflects a different estimation method rather than a contradiction ⁸.

The subscription behind this is ChatGPT Plus, with other tiers added over time; OpenAI's own pricing changes are outside the scope of the store data here. What the store data does show is the scale of the category it created: Sensor Tower counted ChatGPT reaching 50 million monthly actives faster than Temu, Disney+ or YouTube Music, with AI app spending near $1.1 billion in 2024 ⁷; Appfigures put the 2024 figure at $1.42 billion, up 274% ⁵, and Sensor Tower said AI app spending passed $4.2 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, against $1.83 billion in the same period of 2025 ⁹.

Who the users are

Appfigures reported in January 2025 that ChatGPT had been downloaded about 353 million times on mobile, that men made up 84.5% of users, and that more than half of mobile users were under 25, with the 50–64 bracket the second largest at 20.2% ⁵. Sensor Tower estimated more than 200 million US users of AI assistants by the end of 2025, of whom 110 million used them only on mobile, up from about 13 million a year earlier ⁸. That mobile-only group is the chart fixture's engine: people whose entire relationship with ChatGPT runs through the App Store or Google Play.

The competitors on the chart

The AI assistant chart has become its own league table, and ChatGPT's share of it is shrinking as the table grows.

Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026 report dated the moment ChatGPT's share fell under 50% to January 2026, and put it at 46.4% by the end of May, with Gemini at 27.7% and Claude at 10.3% ⁹. The same report counted more than 1.1 billion ChatGPT monthly actives, while OpenAI's last self-reported figure was 900 million weekly actives in February 2026 ^9,14. Gemini reached a billion monthly users in August 2026, so the two leaders are now roughly level in reach, a very different picture from 2024, when ChatGPT was the only AI app in Apple's US top 10 ^6,11.

OpenAI's response in the app has been to remove friction for free users, most visibly by making text chats unlimited on the free tier in August 2026 ¹⁵, and to start showing ads, which Sensor Tower says reached about 17% of daily users by May 2026 after a February rollout ⁹. Both moves protect install velocity and daily opens, which is to say they protect the chart position.

How this shows up in the charts

Pull up ChatGPT in search and you will see the pattern described above: a long, flat run near the top of the US iOS free chart with brief dips when a rival launch (DeepSeek in January 2025, Sora in October 2025) takes the No. 1 slot for a week or two. The Top Grossing position tells the revenue story in the same view. For the AI category as a whole, the iOS movers page is where new model launches show up first, usually as a 50-plus-place jump by Gemini, Claude or Grok on the day of a release. Our guide to how App Store rankings work explains why those jumps fade within days while ChatGPT's baseline does not.