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OpenAI’s Sora leaps to the top of the app download charts

TikTok and Meta has a new and more advanced competition

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Depiction of OpenAI Sora video generator on a phone.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Sora, the text-to-video generative AI chatbot from OpenAI, has quickly become the most-downloaded app since its recent update to the Sora 2 platform, highlighting the growing impact of the company’s suite of products.

What’s happened? OpenAI launched Sora, a social app that could generate AI videos. It immediately climbed the App Store charts, hitting the third spot on debut and ultimately reaching number one a day after.

  • The app launched on September 30, 2025 in an invite-only release in the U.S. and Canada.
  • Sora allows users to create hyperreal short videos based on text inputs and users can add themselves or their friends into generated videos.
  • In the report by 9to5mac via AppFigures, about 56,000 U.S. installs were recorded on day one and about 108,000 installs on day two.

Why is it important?

  • It’s a new milestone for generative AI, and a critical move as companies like Google make waves with image generation tools like Nano Banana.
  • Sora 2 makes high-quality, text-to-video generation a social product, not merely simple responses or answers, and these download numbers show that there’s a strong appetite for that.
  • This positions OpenAI in competition for short-form video where Meta, TikTok and Google are already playing. 

Why should I care?

  • If you’re a content creator, Sora significantly reduces threshold of creating attention-grabbing short videos since making videos require no camera, no live shoot, excessive editing or actors.
  • However, there are also safety, ethics and identity risks since Sora’s hyperreal outputs are concerns for topics of consent, deepfakes and misinformation.

What’s next?

  • OpenAI will most likely extend invites outside the U.S./Canada and look for wider rollouts.
  • The application could also find itself examined by safety teams, authorities, and the public. OpenAI is meant to stop the app from being used for inappropriate content, but CNBC has reported that some users have already found a way around those protections.
  • Many existing short-form video apps might hasten their own generative features or product experimentation to retain users from shifting to Sora.
Kobe Patrick
Kobe Patrick
Former News Writer
Kobe Patrick is a content writer and multimedia journalist. He is experienced in writing articles that cover a variety of…
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