Even a few weeks ago, AI photo apps were doing brisk business and plenty of photos generated using these apps were filling up social media feeds. Everyone seemed to like Lensa AI’s ‘magic avatars’ or pictures turned into “art” using AI tech. New data from the app intelligence firm Apptopia shows that consumer interest in AI photo apps has fallen drastically.
Apptopia has gone through the top AI photo apps worldwide, tracking download growth as well as in-app consumer spending. The firm shared its analysis with TechCrunch and it’s not looking good for these apps. Apptopia examined the leading AI photo app Lensa AI and others like Remini, Pixelup and Fotor. Apptopia found that at the height of popularity, the apps topped 4.3 million daily downloads and $1.8 million per day in consumer spending via in-app purchases. As of February 13, these apps saw only around 952,000 combined downloads and around $507,000 in consumer spending.
Lensa AI has been around since 2018 but it found popularity in November-December 2022, making it reach the number one spot on the iOS App Store’s competitive ‘Photo & Video’ charts. The “magic avatars” use the open-source Stable Diffusion model to process selfie photos and create avatars but the app was also in for criticism because it’s easy to trick the app into making upsetting images.
But these apps had another problem — there was nothing unique to each of them. Basically, the output was some variation on AI avatars. This was also the time when another AI technology took over conversations — ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that was released on November 30, 2022. Helping ChatGPT is the way Microsoft has been pushing it. Google unleashed its answer — Bard — but it took a hit after offering a wrong answer. At the moment, it’s about the AI race to take over search engines. Will Google continue to be the search king or will Bing and Neeva slowly take over? By the way, in case you haven’t checked out Neeva, do so right away. It is different in the sense that it charges a subscription while offering greater privacy. Behind the start-up are Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, IIT alumni and former Google executives. Ramaswamy was once in charge of Google’s $115 billion advertising arm but after becoming disillusioned with the business, left in 2018.
