132 percent. That's how much ChatGPT's uninstall rate grew year over year in April 2026, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The March 2026 figure was worse - uninstalls were up 413 percent compared to March 2025, according to The Verge.
These are not the numbers of a product in confident growth mode.
The Chatbot Market Has Fragmented
For roughly two years after ChatGPT's late 2022 launch, it faced no serious competition in consumer AI chat. That's no longer true. Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok have each built real user bases by targeting specific needs better than a general-purpose assistant can.
Claude attracts users who write a lot - its responses tend to be longer and better suited to complex documents. Perplexity markets itself as a search replacement, returning answers with source citations rather than generated text alone. Grok is embedded directly in X (formerly Twitter), making it the path of least resistance for a specific type of user. None of these is likely to overtake ChatGPT on raw user numbers, but each pulls from a pool that ChatGPT previously had mostly to itself.
OpenAI has also made it harder to stay loyal to its own product. The current model lineup - GPT-4o, o1, o3, o4-mini, and various specialty modes - is not intuitive. Most people can't tell you which model they're using or why they'd choose one over another. The free tier has become more restricted over time, and subscription pricing has changed multiple times. These are friction points that competitors with simpler product lines can use to their advantage.
What IPO Investors Will See
OpenAI is pursuing an IPO and has been valued at over $300 billion in private markets. Those numbers assume continued growth. Slowing downloads and accelerating uninstalls are the kind of data that gets highlighted in an S-1 filing and interrogated on roadshows.
Consumer apps are valued heavily on retention - not just how many people download the app, but whether they keep using it. Rising uninstall rates signal that a significant share of people who tried ChatGPT decided it wasn't worth keeping. That's a retention problem, not just a competition problem.
The strongest counter-argument for OpenAI is that consumer app metrics may be increasingly beside the point. If a growing share of revenue comes from enterprise contracts and API access - where businesses pay to build their own products on top of OpenAI's models - then consumer churn is real but manageable. A developer paying $50,000 a month in API fees matters more to the income statement than a user who uninstalled the app after a free trial.
The problem is that OpenAI hasn't disclosed enough about its revenue breakdown for anyone to know how much consumer retention actually matters. When the IPO filing arrives, that question will get real scrutiny. For now, the uninstall numbers are the most visible public data point available - and they point in one direction.