Google’s Gemini leads India’s AI chatbot downloads; ChatGPT's share halves in a year
While ChatGPT remains the dominant force globally, Gemini has gained significant ground in India since the launch of its multilingual mobile app last June. It accounted for over half of India’s AI chatbot downloads in 2024, while ChatGPT’s share fell to 32%.
2024 could well go down as the year that chatbots went mainstream, with consumer interest in AI language model apps skyrocketing globally. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT—as synonymous with chatbots today as Google is with search—largely dominated worldwide, its share in India (and a few other emerging markets) lagged behind Google’s Gemini.
Data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reveals that Google Gemini accounted for more than half of India’s AI chatbot downloads last year, capturing a 52% market share ahead of ChatGPT’s 32%. The latter saw a sharp decline from the year-ago period when its market share in India was at 67%.
Gemini has gained significant traction in the country since the rollout of its multilingual mobile app—it supports English and nine Indian languages—in June 2024. The app has already clocked over 50 million downloads on the Play Store.
“From students to developers and many other curious minds, people in India are embracing Gemini's capabilities to enhance their productivity, learning, and creativity in everyday life,” Amar Subramanya, VP, Engineering, Gemini Experiences at Google, wrote in an earlier blog. “The app allows you to type, talk, or even add an image to get the assistance you need,” he added.
Other AI chatbots, including Perplexity, Copilot (owned by Microsoft), Claude, Character AI, ChatOn, etc., make up the remaining (16%) of the market.
It’s not just in India, though, that ChatGPT’s share declined; similar trends were observed in Brazil and other Latin American (LatAm) markets too, with a host of local AI chatbots (Nova, for instance) gaining ground. In LatAm, for instance, ChatGPT had a 42% market share in Q3 2024—its lowest across world regions.
ChatGPT, however, remained the world’s most downloaded AI chatbot, with downloads crossing 90 million during the quarter, registering a yearly growth of 100%. It has captured 53% of the AI mobile app market globally, according to Sensor Tower. The OpenAI product leads in the US and the UK, with download shares of 45% and 47% respectively, while Google Gemini’s shares stand at 11% and 18%, respectively.
India, meanwhile, is already the world’s largest consumer of all kinds of AI apps, not just chatbots. A prior report by Sensor Tower showed that it accounted for 21% of global downloads of AI apps (with image/video editing apps being very popular), exceeding 2.2 billion downloads until August 2024. India’s share in AI app downloads was higher than that of even LatAm (20%) and Europe (15%).