Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store

https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts

by byincugnito • 5 months ago

286 123 5 months ago

apps.apple.com

gdiamos• 5 months ago

It was inevitable.

PacificSpecific• 5 months ago

I've never looked at the app store rankings before. Number 3 is a app for buying shoes? That seems quite specific.

rorylawless• 5 months ago

People will always need shoes.

jaustin• 5 months ago

This is a sure sign we’re nearing the shoe event horizon (https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon and audio https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nEI19kJ5GfU )

lukew3• 5 months ago

I think their ads are better than chatgpt’s. I’ve seen them more recently encouraging people to “keep thinking” and use it to improve themselves

milleramp• 5 months ago

I don't know, the one with the simple minds song was pretty good.

gylterud• 5 months ago

I did not realise there are ads for LLMs. Of course if I thought about it, I would conclude that there must be. But somehow the concept seems strange to me. What do they advertise? The LLM can do so many different things… I guess they are all “welcome! To the world of tomorrow!”

Then again, I know nothing about ads these days. Last time I had any ad exposure was twenty years ago, when I lived at home with my parents.

smj-edison• 5 months ago

I've previously seen some ads for Claude on YouTube, mainly following the style of a programmer influencer talking about it. But I'm more of a technical audience.

Though, I happened to be watching the Superbowl, and Anthropic was all in taking pot shots at OpenAI's recent decision to start incorperating ads. Very much addressed towards a general audience. Here's one of them for example: https://youtu.be/FBSam25u8O4

outside12342• 5 months ago

That’s what happens when a bunch of us delete our OpenAI accounts, delete ChatGPT, and download Claude

slashdave• 5 months ago

Too bad we can't see the top deleted App

whyage• 5 months ago

Why is Dick's Sporting Goods in the top 3?

yesbut4• 5 months ago

they were having a sale on jock straps.

Stevvo• 5 months ago

It has a step counter in it that gives you loyalty points. So people are walking around all day with the app running to get a free pair of shoes.

bob1029• 5 months ago

https://ads.apple.com/app-store

FatChauncy• 5 months ago

I’m not sure why everybody else likes it, but for me, the Move feature gives me 3 points per day for doing what I already do (10k steps, 3mi run, or 30 active minutes). It makes the $10 rewards flow in more quickly.

lkbm2• 5 months ago

It's just $10 every ~3 months, right? Not nothing, and at no real cost, but surprising how much people care.

lkbm2• 5 months ago

Here's a recent tweet with 1.7MM views pointing out that you can get gift cards just by connecting it to Apple Fitness and being active: https://x.com/edgaralandough/status/2026279637911736585

yesbut4• 5 months ago

As usual, the corporations benefiting from supporting war and subverting the rights of everyday citizens is rewarded by massive subsidies by the capitalist state.

Anthropic currently is winning the public sentiment war, but OpenAI is being established as another to-big-to-fail capitalist regime institution.

patcon• 5 months ago

I'd just been using the free version of OpenAI for my easy tasks, so as not to waste my Claude credits on them. About time I deleted it and gave it the poor review it deserves.

A_D_E_P_T2• 5 months ago

Obvious political reasons and implications aside, a clear quality gap opened up late last year when Opus 4.5 was released vs. GPT-5. Opus was obviously and demonstrably superior to any GPT-5 tier. The release of GPT-5.2 didn't improve matters, and then Opus 4.6 widened the gap further. Right now talking to GPT-5.2 Pro is 10x slower than chatting with Opus 4.6 and the output returned is, nevertheless, generally lower quality and more "sloppy."

What I'm getting at is that this could be, in part, because Claude is genuinely better at this point in time.

yesbut4• 5 months ago

no, it is because of the public perspection of Anthropic holding a principled stance against allowing their software to pull the trigger and kill humans. ChatGPT still has the bigger brand name recognition.

A_D_E_P_T2• 5 months ago

If that's entirely the case, there could still be interesting implications, as people who switch to Claude are unlikely to switch back to ChatGPT in the near future. (If, that is, they regularly use LLMs for any technical or professional task.)

JLCarveth• 5 months ago

I guarantee you the people downloading these apps aren't thinking about that. They use what works best.

ramraj07• 5 months ago

Anyone who's used both Claude and ChatGPT will instantly agree what is better by a large margin. Theres maybe a brand recognition long tail but its more likely theyre the rare occasional users who use the free tier. Thus ChatGPT is becoming the shitty free AI app while Claude is what you use to get real work done. Time (in months) will tell yow this will go.

virgildotcodes4• 5 months ago

I just cancelled my OpenAI $200 sub yesterday because of all this, but sadly I can't agree.

Codex 5.3 Xhigh > Opus 4.6 in my work to this point.

Hoping for Opus 4.7 or whatever comes next to rectify this as I'm a bit annoyed over having to drop to a lower quality model.

verst2• 5 months ago

I use Opus 4.6 Fast-mode. It produces significantly better results in my work than any Codex 5.3 tier.

jetbalsa• 5 months ago

What where you using it for? claude is really good at agentic stuff, Pure coding, I can see codex being better, but for the entire workflow, I'm not sure

lumirth• 5 months ago

Weirdly enough, I agree with both sides. Opus beats every version of GPT 5 as a chat interface, hands down. ChatGPT, at this point, is mostly me correcting its output style, cadence, behavior, etc, and consistently remaining dissatisfied, meanwhile Opus one-shots things I didn’t even think it could (Typst code). All that said, I do my programming in OpenAI’s Codex app for Mac. It has completely dominated Claude Code for me. I’ll only ever use Opus to check 5.3-Codex’s work. Very weird world we’re living in. I hope it gets even weirder once Deepseek does whatever they’ve been cooking.

XCSme2• 5 months ago

For coding, I agree, Codex-5.3 is the best out there.

But for the chat, I feel like ChatGPT got worse and worse.

sheeshkebab• 5 months ago

Agree on the gap - in my own complex greenfield software dev spec test, opus 4.6 blows codex 5.3 out of the water, by wide margin, both in ui and backend.

enraged_camel• 5 months ago

Yep. For the past month I’ve been doing this thing where every time I need something from AI, I give Opus and Codex the same prompt. Opus is just better by a wide margin, especially on complex tasks. It uses tools quite a lot, taps into available MCP servers when it makes sense, and can think about repercussions down the line much better. Codex I feel is optimized for brevity, approaching terseness. Hard to put my finger on it but it’s never as thorough and it always misses important details.

jackschultz• 5 months ago

Massivly better and I cannot understand how many comments online say that they're comparable (other than paid actors which now fits the right wing angle that OpenAI takes because right wing paid online comments seems quite common overall).

I remember on the Opus 4.5 release data watching what it can do to my test app I wanted it to build and saying outloud to myself "oh shit" because of how much better it was at the conversation, planning, understanding, and building. Posts like this[0] say similar things, where Opus 4.5 release + Claude Code was the tipping point and the gap is widening and Anthropic has infinite more momentum and going in the better direction with useful models that aren't fully aligned with bad actors.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515696

outside12342• 5 months ago

OpenAI bribed Trump: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam

altmanaltman• 5 months ago

And Dick's Sporting Goods beats Google Gemini to become the 3rd app on US App Store, like what are we doing here?

nozzlegear• 5 months ago

What's wrong with Dick's Sporting Goods?

aendruk• 5 months ago

It’s some consumer loyalty scheme for a chain retailer? Depressingly distant from the “bicycle for the mind” I’d dreamed of.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 5 months ago

Dick’s Sporting Goods is objectively more useful than Gemini.

wewewedxfgdf• 5 months ago

ChatGPT and Gemini's coding capabilities are being left in the dust they'd better catch up or be irrelevant fast.

ajaimk• 5 months ago

Considering App Store Ranking is based on recent volume, this just says that a lot of people download Claude over ChatGPT in the last 24-48 hours.

This a nothing burger

verst2• 5 months ago

I am one of the people who uninstalled ChatGPT and closed their account and installed Claude in the last 24 hours. I know plenty of others who did the same. I wonder whether this trend can be sustained.

surgical_fire• 5 months ago

I dislike OpenAI as much as anyone else, but I doubt this trend will be sustained, and I also doubt this will have any huge impact in numbers.

Most people just don't care.

technion• 5 months ago

I just searched the play store to download claude myself. I had to scroll a page and a half past sex bot apps to find it.

Meanwhile I have a working desktop app but this magic email link nonsense doesnt seem to work on my phone.

AmericanOP3• 5 months ago

For 50 years we've known EVERYTHING Trump touches turns to mierde.

Sam thought he was special. He is not.

bossyTeacher• 5 months ago

I wonder if this is related to the Pentagon incident. Dario's interview with the CBS has a lot of views too.

iainctduncan• 5 months ago

The real story here is "how the hell did Dick's Sporting Goods get to #3 and how can I get me some of their magic dust?"

gritspants• 5 months ago

Well, apparently they give you some miniscule rewards points for meeting step or activity goals. I told my wife who was immediately intrigued. Pump out more apps that appeal to women.

dawnerd• 5 months ago

United healthcare does that too and it’s great because it’s just straight cash on a visa gift card. Like 1.25 a week for just doing your normal stuff and more for hitting other goals. Easy to rig too…

alfredoav• 5 months ago

This does not check out for me intuitively. You are telling me Dick's sporting goods with 800 stores was able to get to the top of the app store leaderboard, which companies spend a lot of effort and money on, against the largest AI behemoths, by giving rewards on activity goals? I think it has to be something else.

pjc502• 5 months ago

Must be pretty high turnover on these charts, they're not on there at all now. Which might mean the absolute numbers are smaller than you'd expect.

JKCalhoun• 5 months ago

Yeah, dropped ChatGPT today. Downloaded the desktop version of Claude.

I won't go back.

rsync• 5 months ago

rsync.net is (minimally) an openai customer. I've used it mostly as a curiosity but others here have used it in more professional manner.

When we created the account we shared essentially zero personal information and used a purpose-specific email, etc. No ID scans, no passports, no robust ID verification. It is a company account, after all, so it would make no sense to tie it to a particular person ...

All of this to ask:

In 2026, if I choose to boycott openAI on behalf of my firm, and perhaps sign up for Claude with the intention of using either the web interface or a terminal CLI ... what will be demanded in terms of identity and personal information ?

deaux• 5 months ago

IME, zero. None of them require things like this for the web interface or terminal CLI.

And if you want to use the API? OpenAI requires full identity documentation upload and potentially selfies sending to Persona (the exact thing Discord was just chastised over) if you want to use a remotely recent model. Anthropic doesn't ask for any of this - and neither does any other model provider.

GeoAtreides3• 5 months ago

As Sydney Sweeney demonstrated, going MAGA is a bad marketing strategy and in the end just loses money

Chris20482• 5 months ago

Except she didn't go "MAGA", and American Eagle reported higher sales and increased stock price after the Sweeney ad.

GeoAtreides3• 5 months ago

let's be honest, she projected a certain image

american eagle sales are one thing, Sydney's image and PR are another...

k310• 5 months ago

I read the terms regarding mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Both OpenAI and Anthropic had similar holdbacks AFAICT. [0]

The Pentagon has agreed to OpenAI's rules for deploying its technology safely in classified settings, though no contract has been signed, a source familiar with the talks tells Axios.
Why it matters: The Pentagon has blasted OpenAI rival Anthropic for days, contending its red lines for AI use in the military -- mass surveillance and autonomous weapons -- are philosophical and "woke."
Now, the department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, appears to have accepted OpenAI's similar conditions.

One big difference

OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift [1]

I guess that makes it "less woke". This is reprehensible political bullshit.

[0] https://archive.ph/9NcMf#selection-579.0-611.135

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/brockman-openai-top-trum...

rvz3• 5 months ago

This is hardly surprising given that OpenAI already signed a military contract. [0]

Where was the open letter then? No-one cared.

Recently, Claude was already used by the administration for the operation in Venezuela [1] alongside Palantir. Anthropic did nothing at the time and again...

No-one cared.

Now everyone cares when Anthropic finally said No? The decision for the contract was already predetermined for OpenAI, even with the open letter.

So the question is, why wasn't the open letter against OpenAI done last year when they signed that first military contract?

Either way, it seems that OpenAI and Anthropic were all OK with the US government using their models for warfare so really there is no point in defending both of them or even the employees who knew beforehand.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/17/openai-mi...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...

lotyrin• 5 months ago

How sure are we that something fishy isn't going on with the models and the alignment research teams and the answers the model is giving? Like maybe Claude's alignment made it worse at trying to mask as Allied Magacomputer than GPT and that's why they're up in arms?

sigmar3• 5 months ago

Now everyone cares when Anthropic finally said No?

DoD started asking for the ability to do more stuff. That's the issue here. "Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance... Fully autonomous weapons." https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

So the question is, why wasn't the open letter against OpenAI done last year when they signed that first military contract?

again, this story isn't about people that are against any military contract.

xvector• 5 months ago

No, OpenAI has consented to "all legal use" whereas Anthropic required the redlines to be in the ToS itself, regardless of what's legal.

So for all intents and purposes the DoD can simply ignore OAI's redlines.

softwaredoug2• 5 months ago

“ though no contract has been signed”

Is doing a lot of work here

villgax• 5 months ago

The sheer irony of admitting spying on the global population from both.

api• 5 months ago

If it’s in the cloud it’s not your computer. I assume there is no privacy in the cloud unless it’s locally encrypted and only stored there.

smt882• 5 months ago

When has the US govt and its allies been secretive about spying on non-citizens? We literally have agreements with European allies to collaborate on it.

bpodgursky3• 5 months ago

The sheer naivete to think the United States has any legal or moral obligation to respect the privacy of the global population.

slopinthebag4• 5 months ago

Does that apply to all moral obligations?

Does Iran have a moral obligation to not nuke the global population? What about Israel and Palestine?

truetraveller• 5 months ago

Legal, no. Moral, absolutely. I mean, aren't other people human?

AmericanOP3• 5 months ago

The Patriot Act and spying on US citizens was a major issue a decade ago.

The prevalence of data and a general sense of powerlessness means this won't get talked about much sadly.

slopinthebag4• 5 months ago

And the sheer irony of Americans proclaiming Anthropic as morally superior because of it. Do they think America is the only country or something? I thought that was just a trope.

EasyMark• 5 months ago

I suspect any 5 eyes countries can get any information they want on any citizen in any of the countries in that unholy agreement.

jazzyjackson2• 5 months ago

So dumb, I have to think it's astroturfed. Anthropic states they're not willing to help with autonomous weapons because it's not good enough yet, and suddenly everyone cancels their OAI subscription? I just don't get it

smt882• 5 months ago

The sticking point seems to be that Anthropic didn't want to help the Trump regime spying on its own citizens (by using Claude to sift through mass-surveillance data)

evan_2• 5 months ago

Most people’s LLM use cases don’t involve autonomous weapons

dmix3• 5 months ago

Do any autonomous weapons have an LLM usecase yet? As opposed to say, specialized visual ML stuff that can fit on a small portable system.

The DoD office staff using it for information analysis, similar to Palantir providing data integration software, isn't quite the same as using it for weapons.

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

Some might be but dont be so sure. Theres a lot of hatred in our country over politics and sides dont matter, all sides can be quite hateful.

foolfoolz• 5 months ago

“everyone” could be one person. these internet reported movements rarely have meaningful impact

SpicyLemonZest• 5 months ago

I can't prove there was no astroturfing, but I was personally absolutely furious and hard-deleted my account Friday evening. I'm not sure how to bridge the gap in understanding, this story was extremely radicalizing for me, I'm genuinely hoping now that OpenAI burns to the ground.

jazzyjackson2• 5 months ago

Why not let Anthropic burn to the ground too? They are still partnered with Palantir offering the same service one incorporation removed.

They are not opposed to autonomous weapons in principle and surveillance on foreigners is fair game. The only moral stance is to use no AI at all (it’s not that hard)

softwaredoug2• 5 months ago

I think it’s from a perception (right or wrong) that OpenAI engineered this kerfuffle to hurt a competitor and cozy up to the administration

raincole• 5 months ago

People don't want salt on their injuries. If OpenAI announced the military contract a few months later no one would care. But they announced it on the same day and that pissed many people (read: maybe 0.1% of ChatGPT users) off.

mrbombastic• 5 months ago

They stated 2 red lines, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, as a result Trump admin threw a hissy fit and cancelled all military contracts going forward and designated them a supply chain risk to further punish them. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 OpenAI on the other hand after all this is openly partnering and seemingly has no such red lines and has given milquetoast explanations as to why this is acceptable. What is surprising about the boycott?

dmix3• 5 months ago

I cancelled ChatGPT and downloaded Claude mobile 1 day before the controversy because I decided to go all in on Claude Code. The chat app isn't quite as good as ChatGPT, feels like a year behind in integration with stuff like web search and retrieval. But it does the job.

dankwizard• 5 months ago

I went the opposite and deleted Claude and replaced it with OpenAI - The money the US Military will bring in is going to elevate ChatGPT to levels the others cannot match

sigmar3• 5 months ago

the claude contract was only 100M/year. about 0.7% of Claude's 14B revenue run rate. Not sure we know anything about the number for openai's new contract.

evan_2• 5 months ago

It’s irritating to me that on iOS at least I can’t be logged in with both my work AND home Claude instances in the native app. I instead have to log in to the app with one and use a desktop shortcut to claude.ai for the other.

brokencode2• 5 months ago

Yeah, being able to switch quickly between amounts is my number one request for the iOS app right now. Logging in on the browser is a good idea though.

crazygringo• 5 months ago

I was going to say that I was surprised that enough "normal" users had heard about the Pentagon news story that it would make a difference.

Then I remembered that the app store rankings [1] seem to be based on activity from just the past day or so.

And so a lot of "plugged-in" users switching to Claude all at once then would be enough to briefly send Claude to #1, since the migration would be sizeable in comparison to the normal daily download baseline.

But we can also expect that this would probably be just a blip for a couple of days, as it's unlikely to make much difference in the baseline ratio for the general population.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts

Sebguer2• 5 months ago

I don't think you realize how mainstream the story has been. My grandfather, who is as non-tech as humanly possible, brought it up to me.

j_bum• 5 months ago

Agreed. My wife acts as my North Star for knowing whether tech news is in the mainstream. She doesn’t care about tech.

She said yesterday and Friday her instagram was full of people deleting ChatGPT and downloading/paying for Claude.

It’s definitely beyond the tech bubble.

canadiantim• 5 months ago

I love Claude, but I’m personally rooting for Dick’s Sporting Goods to take the #1 spot

jackyli022• 5 months ago

Great timing, especially since Anthropic has been shipping huge improvements in their iOS app. Now they've replaced their Stone Age audio input and added live mode, the iOS experience is a lot closer to ChatGPT's (though still lacking a bit)

jackyli022• 5 months ago

Wait till the tiktok influencers hear about this and jump on the bandwagon. Anthropic will keep winning

tbrockman• 5 months ago

Anyone else having issues exporting their data from ChatGPT? I started my export in the morning, still have yet to receive an email for the download. Wanted to make sure my deleted account was included in the beans when they count them on Monday.

mentalgear• 5 months ago

Typical SV/ Scam Altman tactics : technically trying to keep people from moving out of their walled prison-garden. It exemplifies how important open-standards and data export laws are.

SleepyTC• 5 months ago

Am I the only one who claims that Claude always was better than gpt? Used them both in parallel (each for it's own set of tasks) for a long time, an now gpt isn't worth paying for (tbh, rarely use it for anything lately) - regardless of news.

Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store

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