ChatGPT overtakes TikTok and Instagram to become the world’s most‐downloaded app in March

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Technology Insights Daily
April 23, 2025

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ChatGPT’s mobile app recorded its biggest month ever in March 2025, racking up about 46 million new installs and edging past perennial chart‑toppers Instagram and TikTok to claim the No. 1 spot on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to Appfigures data. Downloads jumped 28 percent from February, split roughly 13 million on iOS and 33 million on Android, giving OpenAI its first overall monthly crown.

Analysts tie the surge to two product updates rolled out in late February: a memory system that lets the bot remember user preferences and a viral “Ghibli‑style” image generator that flooded social feeds with whimsical artwork. The features sparked a wave of how‑to videos on Reels and X, driving organic installs in markets such as India, Brazil and the United States. While the milestone underscores growing consumer appetite for generative‑AI utilities over traditional social media, research firms caution that retention and monetisation—ChatGPT’s freemium model converts only about 7 percent of mobile users to paid tiers—will determine whether the app can keep the crown in coming quarters.

Netflix has begun a limited beta of an OpenAI‑powered search engine that understands natural‑language prompts such as “feel‑good sci‑fi for a rainy afternoon” or “dark comedies under two hours.” The generative‑AI tool is opt‑in and currently restricted to iPhone users in Australia and New Zealand, where testers see a chat‑style field alongside the standard title search. Under the hood, Netflix passes user queries to an OpenAI model that maps “mood, tone and situational cues” to the service’s metadata and viewing‑history graph, then returns a curated row of titles. Product managers call the experiment a “learn‑and‑listen phase” and say broader U.S. rollout could follow if engagement lifts the company’s notoriously stubborn discovery metrics. For now there is no Android, TV or web timeline, and Netflix insists it is not sharing watch histories with OpenAI—inputs are anonymised and stripped of identifiers before inference. Observers see the test as a first step toward conversational, cross‑modal recommendations spanning video, games and live events.

On 11 April 2025, U.S. Customs & Border Protection issued guidance carving smartphones, laptops, processors, memory chips and most other consumer‑electronics from President Trump’s new “reciprocal” tariff program. The exclusions, retroactive to 5 April, allow importers to reclaim duties already paid and land future shipments duty‑free. CBP’s list spans twenty product headings—including semiconductors, flash drives, SSDs and flat‑panel displays—shielding the entire device stack from both the blanket 10 % global levy and the 145 % rate on Chinese goods.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick cautioned the reprieve is “not permanent”: a targeted semiconductor tariff could arrive “within a month or two” as part of a national‑security drive to on‑shore chip fabrication.

Tech firms and retailers welcomed the breathing room—analysts reckon the duties would have added up to US$200 to an iPhone—but stress that the policy zig‑zag keeps supply‑chain planning on edge and may simply shift pressure upstream. Beijing, meanwhile, condemned the carve‑out as discriminatory and has hinted at a possible WTO challenge, after already raising its own tariffs on U.S. goods to 125 %.

Microsoft’s latest stable release—Edge 134—arrives with a clutch of low‑level Chromium tweaks that collectively lift real‑world speed by 3 %‑9 % on the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark. The Engineering blog credits three main changes: smarter JavaScript tier‑up logic that caches hot functions earlier, a refined GPU raster‑scheduler that spreads draw calls across available cores, and tighter Blink “operation fusion” that eliminates redundant DOM‑style calculations.

Beyond the headline figure, Microsoft reports 1.7 % quicker navigation, 2 % faster cold‑startup, and up to 7 % better page responsiveness on mixed workloads such as spreadsheet editing and chat apps.

The gains layer on top of longstanding features like Sleeping Tabs and Startup Boost, underscoring the company’s incremental approach: shave milliseconds everywhere, then let automatic updates roll the benefits to hundreds of millions of PCs and Macs.

While a single‑digit uplift may appear modest, analysts note that browsers have long operated near CPU‑bound ceilings; squeezing out another 5‑9 % can translate into visibly snappier scrolling on lower‑power laptops and extend battery life. Users don’t need to lift a finger—Edge self‑updates in the background, so version 134’s optimisations should already be in place on the next reboot.

Bloomberg’s latest Power On report says Apple has “hit pause” on a pure consumer successor to Vision Pro and is instead prototyping a wired, low‑latency “Vision Pro 2” aimed squarely at professional workflows. The headset connects via a Thunderbolt‑class cable to an external compute module—or a Mac—slashing round‑trip latency to under 5 ms, a threshold required for surgical visualisation, live broadcast compositing and industrial robotics. By off‑loading graphics to a desktop‑class M‑series chip, Apple can lighten the visor, shrink the battery pack and drive twin 8K OLED micro‑displays at their native refresh without aggressive compression. Sources say the device will ship with a dedicated SDK that exposes deterministic frame timing so developers can build for medical imaging suites, virtual production stages and CAD review sessions. A cheaper, all‑in‑one Vision model is still on the roadmap, but Gurman notes Vision Pro 2’s pro focus reflects sluggish retail uptake of the US$3,499 original and strong enterprise interest in Apple‑grade mixed reality.

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