Chatgpt became the world’s most downloaded app in March, excluding games, leading the usual contenders for place 1, Instagram and Tik. This is the first time the app has led the monthly download tables and the largest chatgt month ever. According to new data, Chatgpt installations were 28% from February to March to reach 46 million new downloads during March, recently reported the APFIGRAs application provider.
This placed the app shortly before Instagram, which fell in position No. 2. 3.
Perhaps helping to drive installations, chatgpt without some visible updates in March, including the first major update in its image generation capabilities in more than 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, well -known Japanese animation studios after films such as “My Totoro Neighbor” and “Spirit away”.
Openai also lifted some protective measures on content moderation policies for images in March and improved the chatgpt’s sound feature.
Appfigures noted that chatgpt installations have increased 148% year by year when they compare the first quarter of 2021 with Q1 2025.
However, the firm speculates that new features were not the main impetus after this month’s growth for popular chatbot.
“It is starting to feel like Chatgpt is becoming a verb, much like Google did in the 2000s, to the point that many don’t think ‘he’, but on the contrary ‘chatgt’,” said the founder and CEO of Appfigures Ariel Michaeli. “So when there is excitement for him – even for competition like Grok, Manus he, or Deepseek – many who are not swimming on this topic come for him, but they really download chatgpt.”
Due to chatgpt brand recognition, it can be more difficult for other chatbots to be removed. This is partly why anthropic’s claude has poorer performance in this front than chatgt. It is also the reason why Grok could do better than other chatgpt rivals – not necessarily because it is better, but because there is someone famous to trade it with Elon Musk, and a large platform for distribution with X.
Instagram, meanwhile, had previously held place 2 in both Apple App Store and Google Play both in January and February this year, while TIKTOK remained no. 1.
To some extent, increasing Tiktok downloading earlier this year was driven by concerns about a potential US ban as consumers rushed to download the app if they disappeared from app stores. Now, this prohibition is pending as President Trump aims to cut an agreement with China, based on bydance parent Tiktok, to keep the app available to US users.
Before that, Instagram had regularly beaten Tiktok for position 1 in global app stores, as it had been the number 1 app throughout 2024. Instagram popularity in the US market has been growing, remaining a faces among American teens.
For example, a new study of American teenagers by Piper Sandler released this week found that Instagram is the most used social app, with 87% monthly use, compared to 79% for Tiktok and 72% for Snapchat.
In March, other social applications, including those from Meta, rounded the best tables, with Facebook and WhatsApp filling the first five, and others like Capcut, Telegram, Snapchat and Meta Threads in Top 10, along with TEMU.
In total, the top 10 applications were discharged 339 million times in March, higher than 299 million February.
