OpenAI’s Sora soars to No. 1 on Apple’s US App Store (techcrunch.com)

OpenAI’s new AI video app Sora rocketed up the Apple U.S. App Store after an invite‑only launch limited to the U.S. and Canada: Appfigures reports roughly 56,000 day‑one iOS downloads and about 164,000 installs across the first two days. Sora reached No. 3 overall on day two and climbed to No. 1 on October 3, briefly outranking heavyweights like Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT in App Store charts. Appfigures’ apples‑to‑apples comparison (limited to U.S./Canada) shows Sora tied xAI’s Grok for day‑one installs, and comfortably outpaced Anthropic’s Claude (21k) and Microsoft Copilot (7k), though ChatGPT and Gemini logged larger single‑day debuts (≈81k and 80k). The surge matters because it signals strong consumer demand for generative video and social, short‑form AI experiences — a different vector than chat‑first assistants. Technically and strategically, Sora’s performance suggests multimodal video synthesis and easy, shareable workflows can drive rapid adoption even under constrained rollouts, but also raises safety and moderation concerns (e.g., deepfakes) and internal tradeoffs about focus versus broader “hard problem” AI work. The Appfigures caveat on geography underscores that launch strategy and availability shape early metrics, but Sora’s viral uptake will likely accelerate investment and competition around consumer‑grade generative video tooling.