OpenAI’s Sora loses its top app store ranking to Dave’s Hot Chicken

Since its introduction on September 30th, The Sora app from OpenAI has dominated the iOS App Store charts thanks to its simple, snappy AI video generation and an initial looseness interpretation of copyright laws. His reign came to an end on Friday. Your new champion is…Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Yes! Not ChatGPT or Gemini or Topics or one of the other usual suspects. Dave’s Hot Chicken now rules the App Store, where its floppy-beaked, bug-eyed mascot icon expresses appropriate surprise at his rise. How did it do that? How did OpenAI’s TikTok golem lose control? With something people love even more than big language models: free food.

“To celebrate Drake’s birthday, they’re running a free slider giveaway,” says Adam Blacker, PR director at app analytics firm Apptopia. “Free food always drives a flow of downloads.”

In case you’re wondering what Drake has to do with it, he invested in the fast-casual restaurant chain in 2021 and presumably made a big profit when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for $1 reported 1 billion dollars. For the third year in a row, the company gave away one (1) free slider to everyone who downloaded the app for Drake’s birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today; the raffle took place on Thursday.)

“We’re celebrating a celebrity that’s popular and relevant right now, while also putting food in people’s mouths,” says Leon Davoyan, chief technology officer of Dave’s Hot Chicken.

And there are really a lot of people. In a typical week, Davoyan says, Dave’s sees between 20,000 and 25,000 new signups in its loyalty database. On Thursday alone, the promotion attracted 343,531 new accounts – an increase in the brand’s total membership of more than 10 percent in a single day, according to the CTO.

It was enough to knock Sora out of the top spot for the first time since October 3, an impressive feat for an app that’s still invite-only. According to app analytics firm Sensor Tower, Sora recorded 3.2 million iOS downloads in the US in the first 23 days since its launch. That’s a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which, despite being similarly viral, saw 2.3 million downloads in the US over the same period. (Sora is not yet available on the Google Play Store, but is coming soon.) OpenAI declined to comment.

While Sora will likely reclaim the top spot after the Drake promotion ends, Dave’s Hot Chicken should continue to benefit from the sweepstakes. Last year, app downloads in the four weeks following the same marketing push were more than 50 percent higher than the month before, according to Sensor Tower. All those free sandwiches are worth the long-term gain.