Anthropic's Claude is suddenly the most popular iPhone app

Published Friday, June 26, 2026 · 8:19 PM EDT

Anthropic's Claude app became the most popular free iPhone app over the weekend. The app surged from around number 42 on Apple's list of most popular free iPhone apps in early February to number one by Saturday. It overtook OpenAI's ChatGPT, which had held the top position. Web analytics company Similarweb found that daily downloads of the Claude app doubled last week from the previous week. The increased demand led to a brief outage on Monday morning that Anthropic attributed to high demand for Claude over the last week. An Anthropic spokesperson told CNN on Monday that sign-ups for Claude reached an all time record last week. Google search trends show that searches for Anthropic are at their highest level since the company was founded.

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