Meta’s Muse Hits #1 in Two Weeks. Is Meta a Real Contender Now?

Meta held its annual Connect developer conference on September 25, unveiling a major expansion of its personal AI agent Muse alongside new VR hardware. But something bigger than the event itself grabbed attention: Muse became the top free app on both the U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play within two weeks of launch, and Meta’s stock jumped 4.5% to $777.59 on September 24, hitting a 52-week high of $779.82 — with the market crediting Muse for most of the stock’s 37% rise over the past month. The question now: does Meta actually belong in the same conversation as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google?

The centerpiece of Connect was turning Muse into a full shopping assistant. Meta added a real-time voice mode and an expressive, talking avatar, and made Muse reachable through AI glasses — point your glasses at a product on a shelf or a flyer on a wall, and Muse can act on what it sees. On Mac, Muse can now drive apps directly on a user’s behalf, and it got its own email address. Retail connectors expanded to Walmart, Best Buy, American Eagle, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, and Wayfair, on top of the full Shopify catalog and Shop Pay/PayPal for payments, with Expedia and Instacart coming soon. For work, it now plugs into Notion, Granola, GitHub, and Box. The business model: Muse itself is free, and Meta takes a small cut when a transaction actually closes.

The numbers suggest the push is working. According to Sensor Tower, Muse logged 2.5 million downloads in the 13 days after its September 8 launch. Over that same window, Anthropic’s Claude managed 400,000 and xAI’s Grok just 200,000. ChatGPT still led with 3.1 million, but the gap isn’t overwhelming — Muse actually overtook ChatGPT as the #1 free iOS app in the U.S. on September 18. Piper Sandler analyst Tom Champion called it a remarkably strong product. Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon noted that agentic AI use cases had mostly failed to reach ordinary consumers until now, and Muse may be changing that — helped along by Meta’s existing distribution, where WhatsApp and Instagram alone reach billions of users.

Muse didn’t come out of nowhere. As WOWTALE covered back in August, Meta spent four months building the Muse brand layer by layer — the cloud flagship model Muse Spark in April, image and video generation models, a local-only open-weight model called Muse Glimmer, and a coding agent, Muse Code. The September 8 launch of the Muse app was the consumer-facing payoff of that buildout, and this week’s Connect announcements are layered on top of it.

Wall Street has been raising targets to match. JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth lifted his price target from $820 to $920, saying Muse has “the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.” Citizens went from $770 to $885, and Wells Fargo had already moved from $640 to $796 right after the initial launch. Not everyone was convinced going in — Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster expected Meta shares to trade roughly flat or lower heading into the Connect keynote, citing a lack of hard adoption numbers, a call the actual download figures ended up overturning.

Still, it’s too early to say Meta has fully arrived alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. A download surge like this can reflect a new-app-store-charts effect rather than lasting use, and it needs to hold up in retention and daily engagement. Distribution friction remains too: Amazon has blocked Muse from its site over an alleged terms-of-service violation, having already sued Perplexity over its Comet browser agent and blocked agents from OpenAI and Google — moves that look like a defense of its own advertising business. The likely beneficiaries are Amazon’s rivals Walmart and Shopify, both of which have embraced Muse. The contrast with OpenAI, which recently pulled back its own Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT to refocus on enterprise, makes Meta’s opposite bet stand out even more. As WOWTALE’s August analysis put it, Muse’s real test isn’t a download chart — it’s whether Meta’s full stack of models, infrastructure, consumer apps, and wearables actually works together at scale.

Hardware was just as central to the event as Muse itself. Meta VR Glasses, at just 100 grams — a fifth the weight of Meta Quest 3 — pack a 5K micro-OLED display, with the battery and processors offloaded to a separate “puck” clipped to a belt or pocket to keep weight off the face. They support spatial computing controlled by eye and hand gestures, turning any table into a keyboard and touchpad. Aimed squarely at Apple’s Vision Pro, they’ll ship next spring at $1,299.99. Meta’s AI glasses lineup, spanning Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Meta-branded frames, will grow past 100 styles by year’s end, including Meta’s first audio-only glasses and an FDA-cleared hearing-enhancement feature for mild to moderate hearing loss. South Korea, Singapore, and Mexico joined as new markets, with Brazil and the UAE to follow.