Manus AI Joins the AI App Race, But Can It Really Compete?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Catching Up?. Check out the full article for more insights.
A few months ago yet another AI app came on the scene and stole the news cycle for a bit. That was Manus AI, an autonomous AI agent that's more autonomous than other agents and can complete complex, multi-step tasks, with a simple prompt.
Manus officially rolled out in early March as invite-only but only recently rolled out a mobile app and an in-app purchase (and I managed to get in), and the first thing I wanted to see is how its launch stacks with other AI apps.
According to our App Intelligence, Manus AI got 130K downloads in the 13 days after it launched. And it's worth noting that these numbers only cover Manus on the App Store because even though there is a version for Android and it has gotten downloads, it's not popular enough to get an estimate yet.
The downloads are primarily coming from the US, which contributed 26% so far. That's consistent with many other AI apps, but surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is Manus' second biggest driver of downloads and the only other country with a double-digit share of 11%.
The UK, Germany, and France round out the top five but the list is very long and contains every country we have estimates for.
This number of downloads, while impressive, puts Manus at last place when compared to other AI apps. ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini all had 2M+ downloads in their first 13 days on the App Store. The only one Manus is close to is Claude, which opened to just 220K downloads, according to our estimates.
Considering it's more than an order of magnitude away, I think Manus has a hard task ahead of it.
But what about money?
Our estimates show that since launch, users have spent a total of $163K on Manus' subscriptions. Much like the downloads, the US contributed the largest share with Saudi Arabia right behind it. The UK, Japan, and the UAE round out the top five and if you're thinking what I'm thinking the answer is yes, this isn't common.
Unlike downloads, Manus' ability to monetize early on is an advantage not all competitors poses. Grok leads in this category - the only AI app with more than a million in revenue so early on - with ChatGPT getting close and then Manus in third but following a pretty big cliff.
Not terrible, but really makes you think about the importance of branding not just for discovery but also for conversion.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
