If you haven’t noticed already, people are barely posting their AI-generated “magic avatars” on social media now. The trend that saw Lensa AI shoot up to the top charts on the Apple App Store has fizzled out as quickly as it caught on. And now we know why – new data from app intelligence firm Apptopia indicates that consumer interest in AI photo apps has fallen. In an analysis shared with TechCrunch, Apptopia found that a group of AI apps including Lensa AI and others first took off around Thanksgiving (around November 24, 2022), then hit their peak in terms of downloads and in-app purchases around mid-December. At the height of their popularity, these apps saw over 4.3 million downloads daily and generated $1.8 million per day in consumer spending through in-app purchases. Compare that to November 11 when the apps saw their lowest revenue at $0.37 million and November 19 when they saw their lowest number of downloads at 0.84 million. These lows were followed by a hype cycle where these apps quickly saw their peak. But cut more recently to February 13th, and the photo apps only garnered 952,000 combined downloads and around $507,000 in consumer spending, with the numbers continuing to fall. The group of apps analysed by Apptopia included Lensa AI and others, including Voi, Remini, Pixelup, Fotor, Wonder, FacePlay, Aiby, FaceApp, Gradient, Dawn AI, Facetune, Prequel, Voilà AI Artist, New Profile Pic Avatar Maker, and Meitu. The hype cycle first began with Lensa AI’s success. While the app has been around since 2018, it shot up in popularity after it added the new avatar feature. The addition took it to the no.1 spot on the iOS App Store’s “Photo & Video” charts, overtaking the likes of YouTube and Instagram. Lensa AI required a user to upload a few of their selfies, which the app then used to generate multiple “magic avatars” using the open-source Stable Diffusion model. The fast-waning popularity could be explained by how the app worked. It generated a flurry of avatars on the first go itself, leaving users no motivation to try it for the second time, especially considering that the feature was paid (50 unique avatars for Rs 349 at the time). Moreover, AI is a fast-moving field which is seeing new, exciting announcements every other day. People are currently flipping out over Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, which comes with ChatGPT-like capabilities allowing users to get human-like responses in clear language for queries as opposed to simply an array of links.
