Gemini hits No. 1 on iPhone app chart

Google just did what once felt unthinkable: it knocked ChatGPT off the top spot in the U.S. App Store, and it did so with a bizarrely named feature called Nano Banana.

Google Gemini claimed the No. 1 spot on Apple’s Top Free Apps chart in the U.S., pushing OpenAI’s ChatGPT down to second place. No other standalone AI app even cracked the top ten. Globally, Gemini entered the top five iPhone apps across 108 countries, according to data from Appfigures.

Oddly enough, on Google’s home turf—the U.S. Google Play Store—Gemini surged from No. 26 to No. 2, but ChatGPT still held onto the crown.

The viral power of keeping faces consistent

The secret sauce behind this sudden surge is Nano Banana, an image-editing model Google rolled out on August 26.

Instead of just spitting out random surreal artwork, Nano Banana tackles the holy grail of mobile image generation: character likeness and consistency. You can hand it a selfie, ask it in plain English to change an outfit or merge multiple photos, and the person still looks like the same actual person.

That viral hook paid off instantly. Josh Woodward, VP of Google Gemini and Google Labs, shared on X that between launch and September 9, Gemini gained 23 million first-time users who edited and generated over 500 million images.

Appfigures estimates that halfway through September, Gemini had already logged 12.6 million downloads, up 45% compared to all of August.

It is also printing money. Out of $6.3 million generated on iOS this year, $1.6 million came in August alone, up nearly 1,300% from January. Google gives free users a generous 100 images per day, but if you want 1,000 edits a day, you have to shell out for the $19.99 monthly plan.

Why it matters

We think this shakeup proves a crucial point about consumer AI: raw text-chat benchmarks have hit a wall of diminishing returns for everyday people, but effortless visual utility still drives explosive adoption.

For creators and casual users, this is genuinely worth testing. Getting consistent characters used to require tuning complicated workflows in Midjourney or Stable Diffusion on a desktop. Having that inside a mobile app with 100 free generations a day is an absolute steal.

For Google, leading with consumer-friendly image editing is a clever wedge to pull millions into its wider ecosystem. The risk, however, is the classic viral trap. Novelty photo filters bring massive download spikes, but retention is notoriously brutal. If these 23 million newcomers only treat Gemini as a toy rather than their go-to daily assistant, Google’s App Store victory might end up being just a temporary sprint in a very long marathon.