According to the latest report from Apptopia, a third-party application data analytics firm, the growth trajectory of the ChatGPT mobile app might have hit a plateau. Monitoring by the agency has unveiled that since April 2025, there has been a marked deceleration in the rate of new global downloads for ChatGPT. Furthermore, the growth in daily active users has recently ground to a halt. Data indicates that over the past month, the global daily active user growth curve for the ChatGPT mobile app has leveled off. There is an anticipated 8.1% month-on-month decline in global downloads projected for October. It's important to clarify that what's experiencing a slowdown is the growth rate of downloads, not the total number of downloads. After all, the ChatGPT mobile app still racks up millions of downloads on a daily basis.

A deeper dive into the data reveals that since July, the average daily usage time among U.S. users has plummeted by 22.5%, and the frequency of daily app launches has seen a 20.7% drop. However, the user churn rate has diminished and stabilized, suggesting that the app has successfully retained its core user base.

The primary culprits behind this trend are heightened market competition and alterations to the AI model's characteristics. This includes the competitive pressure exerted by Google Gemini and the changes in user experience brought about by the AI model's reduced tendency to flatter users in its responses following the April update. The GPT-5 version, which was rolled out in August, is also suspected of having diminished the conversational intimacy.

Nonetheless, Apptopia points out that even before Gemini shot to the top of the rankings, thanks to the release of the Nano Banana image model in September, the usage time and launch frequency of ChatGPT users were already on a downward trajectory. Hence, Gemini's ascent can't fully account for the overall trend.

The agency posits that the concurrent decline in usage time and launch frequency is a sign that ChatGPT has moved past the user novelty phase and is gradually becoming a staple in users' daily routines. Users are now more inclined to open the app only when they genuinely need it. For OpenAI, this signals the necessity to ramp up investment in app marketing or roll out new features to bolster core metrics, as the days of driving growth solely through product novelty are over.