Is the trend of AI photo apps already over? In recent months, AI-powered photo apps have gone viral on the App Store as consumers explore AI-powered experiences like Lensa AI’s “magical avatars” feature and other apps promising transform text into images using AI technology. But new data from app intelligence firm Apptopia indicates that consumer interest in AI photo apps has declined as rapidly as it has increased.
The company analyzed the top AI photo apps around the world, tracking both their download growth and consumer spending on the apps.
In its analysis shared with TechCrunch, Apptopia reviewed leading AI photo app Lensa AI and others including Voi, Remini, Pixelup, Fotor, Wonder, FacePlay, Aiby, FaceApp, Gradient, Dawn AI, Facetune, Prequel, Voila AI Artist, New Profile Pic Avatar Maker, and Meitu. (Voi was a late arrival, launching Dec. 7.)
Apptopia found that this group of AI apps started to take off around Thanksgiving, then peaked in terms of downloads and in-app purchases around mid-December. At their peak, the apps exceeded 4.3 million daily downloads and around $1.8 million a day in consumer spending through in-app purchases.
These numbers have since dropped significantly. Yesterday (not shown in the chart below), the same group of apps saw only around 952,000 combined downloads and $434,000 in consumer spending, and the numbers are still falling.
This latest hype cycle started with the resounding success of Lensa AI. Although the app has been around since 2018, Lensa AI went viral from late November to early December 2022 thanks to its new avatar feature that shot it to the top spot on the competitive “Photo & Video” charts of the iOS app store ahead of bigger apps like YouTube and Instagram. Users were fascinated by the app’s clever new “magical avatars” feature which relied on the open-source Stable Diffusion model to process selfie photos to generate avatars that looked like they were created by a digital artist.
But there were soon a number of complaints about how this technology had been used. People found it too easy to trick the app into creating NSFW images, and artists were upset that their work was incorporated into training data without their consent. The latter resulted in many AI profile photos showing similarities to the artists’ work, but they weren’t the ones who benefited.
Consumers seemed to respond to the ethical concerns raised. As TechCrunch reported at the time, some people have started leaving comments on AI photos and profile photos posted on social media to tell people not to use an app that steals artists. This backlash likely stifled some of the demand for AI art. After all, it’s not much fun to use an AI photo for your profile if you’re essentially accused of theft while doing so.
Additionally, some people only wanted to see their own AI profile picture results after seeing TikTok videos about the feature. After going through the creation process once and receiving a collection of photos, there wasn’t necessarily much point in using the feature again.
Some users also complained about the subscription required for what they thought was a one-time task.
Additionally, the app stores themselves had become overrun with AI photo apps, pushing many other AI apps into the top App Store rankings, some of which performed better than others. At one point in mid-December, the top three spots in the US App Store were held by AI photo apps, and many more recently made it into the Top 100. Sensor Tower estimates at the time indicated that 8 of the top 100 apps by downloads were AI art apps. But the apps weren’t particularly differentiated from each other, as they were all variations of AI avatars – like the ones Lensa AI helped popularize – or offered some other type of AI image generator, like those that generated images from text prompts.
The market was immediately too saturated. At the same time, there was growing interest in another form of AI technology: ChatGPT. The AI chatbot was released on November 30, 2022 and quickly caught the attention of consumers. In January, the App Store was once again flooded with AI apps. But this time it was with questionable ChatGPT apps, not copies of Lensa AI. Apple quickly removed one of the most prominent fake ChatGPT apps, but others remained.
More recently, we’ve seen consumer interest in ChatGPT-like experiences drive Microsoft’s Bing near the top of the App Store after announcing integrations with OpenAI’s new chatbot technology, which promises to be a improvement over ChatGPT. It’s unclear whether AI chatbots will actually dethrone traditional search in the short or long term, despite the immediate threat, as there are still concerns about the bots’ ability to produce misinformation. But for now, these apps are the last to intrigue consumers.
The burst of consumer interest in photo AI apps, ChatGPT, and now, Bing, indicates that people are paying attention to AI technology and want to test new ideas first-hand. A winner or winners may eventually emerge here, but it’s too early to tell.
