OpenAI’s video-generating app Sora has surged to the number one position on the U.S. App Store. According to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, it has now technically experienced a bigger first week than ChatGPT on iOS. Their estimates show that Sora saw 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days of availability, compared with ChatGPT’s 606,000 iOS downloads during its first week.
Shortly after the initial publication of this article, OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, announced that the app reached a million downloads across all platforms in under five days. He stated that this was faster than ChatGPT, despite Sora being in an invite-only mode.
It is important to note that ChatGPT was available only in the U.S. during its first week, while Sora is currently offered in the U.S. and Canada. Appfigures data indicated that Canada contributed about 45,000 installs. This means that if the data were based on U.S. numbers only, the Sora launch was about 96 percent of ChatGPT’s launch on iOS.
This level of consumer adoption is particularly notable because Sora requires an invitation to access, while ChatGPT was publicly available at launch. That makes Sora’s performance even more impressive.
During its first day, Sora saw 56,000 iOS app installs, quickly making it the number three Top Overall app on the U.S. App Store. By Friday, October 3, it had reached the number one position. This surge put Sora’s debut ahead of other major AI app launches, including Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot, and on par with xAI’s Grok launch.
A quick scan of social media provides plenty of anecdotes that support the data. Sora videos, which use the new Sora 2 video model and give users the ability to generate realistic content, seem to be everywhere. Users are even creating videos of deceased people, a use case that has prompted Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, to ask people to stop sending her AI-generated images of her father.
According to Appfigures, the app has seen steady adoption since its first day on the market, September 30, 2025. Their data indicates that daily downloads on iOS hit a high mark of 107,800 downloads on October 1. It has since seen daily installs ranging from a low of 84,400 on October 6 to 98,500 on October 4. While these numbers are not as high as earlier in the week, they are still significant for an app that not everyone can yet use.
This post was updated after its original publication on October 8 to include the new information shared by OpenAI’s Bill Peebles.