Bing’s app saw a 10x increase in downloads after Microsoft’s AI news

Microsoft’s news this week that it is expanding its search engine, Bing, with ChatGPT-like capabilities, the corresponding mobile application was added to the top list of the App Store on Wednesday. In the US App Store, the Bing app rose to No. 12 among all free iPhone apps, while Microsoft’s Edge browser is the No. 3 utility. According to preliminary estimates from application intelligence company data.ai, the number of new downloads of the Bing app has increased tenfold worldwide.

The movement indicates that there is significant consumer demand for these new AI experiences, and users may even try new search engines and other browsers to access them.

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the new Bing.com for the first time, which included the much-anticipated integration of a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model. The update brings a ChatGPT-like experience to the search engine itself, allowing users to chat with an AI chatbot to assist with more complex queries and help with certain content creation tasks — like writing a LinkedIn post. Microsoft also introduced a new version of its Edge web browser, which includes the same AI features in the sidebar for easy access.

But while the new version of Bing is technically already live, it’s still in limited preview for now.

Users who want to try out the new AI features must first join a waiting list. Microsoft said it will invite millions of users from the waiting list in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, the company has cleverly introduced a way to move up its waiting list. On the landing page, Microsoft suggests that users can get to the new Bing faster by taking a few extra steps. This involves setting Microsoft search as the default on their computer and scanning a QR code to install the Microsoft Bing app on their smartphone.

Image sources: Bing Queued Site

The latter clearly inspired the app’s rapid rise up the App Store charts – and that’s a dramatic rise.

Before Microsoft’s AI news, Bing wasn’t a popular app at all. As of last week, for example, the application was in 160th place on the American App Store Productivity apps top list – that is, practically invisible. It did not make the US App Store Top Overall Charts at all. In less than a week, it’s already nearing the top 10 in the US, as well as being the #2 productivity app at the time of writing.

Image sources: data.ai diagram of Bing app movement

If the consumer demand wasn’t there, Bing’s app wouldn’t have changed that significantly, no matter how hard Microsoft tried to download it.

Of course, it’s worth noting that App Store graphs can be sensitively affected by the rush of new downloads in a compressed time – that’s why TikTok marketing that makes apps go “viral” has become so effective. Still, the movement of the Bing app is an interesting sign that shows the demand for AI, as well as the potential threat to Google.

Google already pays Apple billions a year to make Safari the default search engine. But if many consumers move to another web search app, such as Bing or Edge, to try new AI capabilities, Google could lose market share on one of the biggest platforms consumers use to browse the web.

It’s also possible that some new users of the Bing app think they can access AI features from the mobile app. To be clear, this is not yet the case. And while the app was recently updated, Microsoft makes no promises about the use of artificial intelligence from this native iOS experience in its Bing App Store description.

In addition to downloading Bing, as requested by Microsoft’s website, some users have also downloaded Microsoft’s Edge browser to their iPhone. While the Edge app didn’t move up the charts as quickly as Bing, it’s now at No. 3 on the U.S. App Store’s top utility list, up slightly from No. 7 on Monday.

More accurate data on all new installations may be available in the coming weeks. If that’s the case, we’ll update with those numbers.