ChatGPT became the world’s most downloaded app in March, excluding games, topping the usual contenders for the No. 1 spot, Instagram and TikTok. This is the first time the app has topped the monthly download charts and ChatGPT’s biggest month ever. According to new data, ChatGPT’s installs jumped 28% from February to March to reach 46 million new downloads during March, app intelligence provider Appfigures recently reported.
That put the app slightly ahead of Instagram, which fell to the No. 2 position. TikTok followed at No. 3.
Perhaps helping to drive installs, ChatGPT saw some notable upgrades in March, including the first major upgrade to its image-generation capabilities in over a year. This led to a viral moment for ChatGPT in late March and early April as users discovered they could generate images and memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the popular Japanese animation studio behind movies like “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”
OpenAI also removed some safeguards around content moderation policies for images in March and upgraded ChatGPT’s AI voice feature.
Appfigures noted that ChatGPT’s installs have grown 148% year-over-year when comparing the first quarter of 2021 to Q1 2025.
However, the firm speculates that new features weren’t the main driver behind this month’s growth for the popular chatbot.
“It’s starting to feel like ChatGPT is becoming a verb, a lot like how Google did in the 2000s, to the point where many don’t think ‘AI’ but rather ‘ChatGPT,’” said Appfigures founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli. “So when there’s excitement about AI — even about competition like Grok, Manus AI, or DeepSeek — many who are not swimming in this topic come for AI but really download ChatGPT.”
Because of ChatGPT’s brand recognition, it may be harder for other AI chatbots to take off. That’s partly why Anthropic’s Claude has poorer performance on this front than ChatGPT. It’s also why Grok could do better when consumers than other ChatGPT rivals — not necessarily because it’s better, but because it has someone famous to market it with Elon Musk, and a large platform for distribution with X.
Instagram, meanwhile, had previously held the No. 2 spot across both the Apple App Store and Google Play in both January and February of this year, while TikTok remained No. 1.
To some extent, TikTok’s download growth earlier this year was driven by concerns over a potential U.S. ban, as consumers rushed to download the app in case it disappeared from the app stores. Now, that ban is on hold as President Trump aims to cut a deal with China, where TikTok parent ByteDance is based, to keep the app available to U.S. users.
Ahead of this, Instagram had regularly been beating out TikTok for the No. 1 position across global app stores, having been the No. 1 (non-game) app throughout 2024. Instagram’s popularity in the U.S. market has been growing, remaining a fave among U.S. teens.
For instance, a new survey of U.S. teens by Piper Sandler released this week found that Instagram is the most-used social app, with 87% monthly usage, compared with 79% for TikTok and 72% for Snapchat.
In March, other social apps, including those from Meta, rounded out the top charts, with Facebook and WhatsApp filling out the top 5, and others like CapCut, Telegram, Snapchat, and Meta’s Threads in the top 10, alongside Temu.
In total, the top 10 apps were downloaded a collective 339 million times in March, higher than February’s 299 million.
