Except for games, ChatGPT surpassed Instagram and TikTok, the typical rivals for the top slot, to become the most downloaded app globally in March. This is ChatGPT’s biggest month ever and the first time the app has topped the monthly download charts. App intelligence company Appfigures recently revealed that ChatGPT’s installs increased by 28% between February and March, reaching 46 million new downloads.
The app was now marginally ahead of Instagram, which dropped to the number two spot. TikTok came in at number three.
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The first significant update to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in more than a year occurred in March, which may have contributed to the increase in installs. As users learned they could create images and memes in the vein of Studio Ghibli, the well-known Japanese animation studio behind films like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away,” ChatGPT experienced a viral moment in late March and early April.
In March, OpenAI also improved ChatGPT’s AI voice capability and eliminated various protections related to image content filtering guidelines.
AppFigures said that when comparing the first quarter of 2021 to Q1 2025, ChatGPT’s installs have increased by 148% year over year.
But according to the company, the increase in popular chatbots this month wasn’t primarily driven by new capabilities.
As Google did in the 2000s, “it’s beginning to feel like ChatGPT is becoming a verb, to the point where many don’t think ‘AI’ but rather ‘ChatGPT,'” stated Ariel Michaeli, founder and CEO of Appfigures. “So many people who are not interested in AI come for AI but download ChatGPT when there is excitement about AI — even about competitions like Grok, Manus AI, or DeepSeek.”
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Other AI chatbots might find it more difficult to gain traction due to ChatGPT’s well-known brand. This is one of the reasons why ChatGPT performs better on this front than Claude from Anthropic. Additionally, Grok may outperform other ChatGPT competitors—not necessarily because it is superior, but rather because Elon Musk, a well-known marketer, and X, a sizable distribution platform, are behind it.
In January and February of this year, TikTok was still the top app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, while Instagram was ranked number two.
Concerns over a possible U.S. ban contributed to TikTok’s download boom early this year, as users hurried to download the app in case it vanished from app stores. Now, that restriction is on hold while President Trump works to reach an agreement with China, the home of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to allow U.S. customers to continue using the app.
Before this, Instagram was the top (non-game) app in 2024 and had been consistently surpassing TikTok for the top spot in international app stores. Instagram is still a favorite among American teenagers, and its market share in the US has been steadily increasing.
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For example, according to a recent Piper Sandler survey of American teenagers, Instagram is the most popular social media app, with 87% of users using it each month, followed by TikTok (79%) and Snapchat (72%).
Other social apps, such as those from Meta, completed the top rankings in March. Facebook and WhatsApp completed the top five, while CapCut, Telegram, Snapchat, and Meta’s Threads joined Temu in the top 10.
March had a total of 339 million downloads of the top 10 apps, which is more than February’s 299 million.
