Openai’s SORA app for AI videos is currently only invited and is limited to US and Canadian users at launch, but it’s a viral hit. According to new data from App Intelligence Provider Appfigures, Sora saw 56,000 downloads on the first day, ranking it as the third top app on Apple’s US App Store. On Friday, October 3rd, it became the No. 1 app in the US app store.
This puts us ahead of Google Gemini and Openai’s ChatGpt.
The company estimates that SORA’s iOS app pulled out a total of 164,000 installations on September 30th and October 1st of the first two days.
Day-One numbers will equal Sora’s debut as the launch of Xai’s Grok ahead of the performance of other major AI apps such as Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot. Meanwhile, Openai’s ChatGpt and Google’s Gemini iOS app each reached at least 80,000 downloads on the first day, with some powerful launches.
This may not be the most unbiased comparison, as Sora is still only an invitation, but we acknowledge it. If all users are open, the new video app could have attracted more installations.
Despite this limitation, it is a rather powerful show of new releases, showing the demand for AI video tools in the hands of consumers, with experiences like social networking. (This is a big part of the crappy of some of Openai. They want the company to focus on solving more difficult problems that benefit humanity. However, they say that humanity has not benefited from the deepfakes of Openai CEO Sam Altman.
To compare SORA’s early success with other AI apps, AppFigures had to perform an analysis that looked at US and Canada downloads of other AI apps. This is because the various AI apps on the market are pursuing different launch strategies. For example, CHATGPT was first released on iOS and was restricted to US users at the time, while Grok limited iOS only releases to the US, Australia and India. Meanwhile, humanity did not show that there were geographical restrictions when it first brought the Claude app to iOS last year.
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For more information about comparing apples and apps, Appfigure calculates numbers and focuses on downloading each app and downloading Canada, if the app was available at launch.
It turns out that ChatGpt and Gemini have bigger launches than SORA, which has 81,000 and 80,000 days of iOS downloads, respectively. SORA is tied to Grok for a one-day installation at 56,000. It also easily beats the launches from AI Apps Claude and Copilot. The former pulled out the 21,000th day download, while the latter only saw 7,000.
Sora also hit the top charts in the US app store and by the second day it was the overall top app, number three. For comparison, ChatGpt was ranked 1st on the second day, Grok was ranked 4th, Gemini was ranked 6th, Copilot was ranked 19th and Claude was ranked 78th.
This post was originally published on October 2, 2025 at 11:24am. Updated to reflect the higher rankings of the app on Friday.
