OpenAI’s AI video creation app Sora launched almost on par with ChatGPT’s historic debut on iOS: in the first 7 days, Sora collected 627,000 downloads (USA+Canada) versus 606,000 for ChatGPT, despite access being «by invitation.»
OpenAI’s AI video creation app Sora launched almost on par with ChatGPT’s historic debut on iOS: in the first 7 days, Sora collected 627,000 downloads (USA+Canada) versus 606,000 for ChatGPT, despite access being «by invitation.»
According to TechCrunch with reference to Appfigures, of these 627,000, about 582,000 were in the US (≈96% of the week-long launch of ChatGPT, which was then only available in the US), another ~45,000 in Canada. On the first day, Sora received 56,000 installations and soared to No. 3 in the overall US top, and on October 3, it topped the App Store. The peak daily value was 107,800. installations on October 1; then the figures stabilized in the range of 84,400–98,500 per day.
Against the backdrop of limited access «by invitation», this is an unusually high pace: the application rose to the top thanks to the virality of the content — videos generated by Sora 2 are massively shared on social networks and attract organic installs. The US remained the main engine of the hype: the additional market of Canada gave only about 7% growth to the «purely American» start, but became noticeable on the leaderboards in the first days.
In terms of weekly launch, Sora has already outpaced the debuts of other major AI apps on iOS (including Claude and Copilot) and has kept pace with the big launch of xAI Grok. At the same time, the «by invite» status means that not everyone who installs the app has full functionality: this is a potential reserve for retaining the audience after opening access to wider waves.
Another factor of interest is the public debate surrounding the ethics of deepfake content: in the wake of Sora’s popularity, cases of deepfakes of deceased people and requests from relatives of public figures not to use their images have emerged online. For app stores and developers, this highlights the need for labeling synthetic video and operational policies to respond to abuse.
The first week showed high interest in Sora 2, but what will be decisive in the future will not be the number of new installations, but whether people come back and actually make videos. If, after expanding the geography, users do not just install the application «out of curiosity», but regularly launch the generation and share clips — this will mean that the product has really «hooked».
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how at the Dev Day conference, OpenAI presented updates to its API, including the presentation of GPT-5 Pro (the latest language model), the Sora 2 video creation model, and a more compact and economical voice model.
