Apptopia: consumer interest in Lensa AI and other top AI-powered photo apps fell quickly after hitting peak downloads and in-app purchases in mid-December 2022
Is the AI photo app trend already over? Over the past several months, AI-powered photo apps have been going viral on the App Store …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lensa's rise was fast even by App Store standards: Sensor Tower counted 12.6M global installs by mid-December, with the Prisma Labs app — a 2018-era product priced at $36 per year — topping the US chart only after adding its Stable Diffusion-powered 'magic avatars' feature.
Two months later, Apptopia's engagement data shows that spike was a ceiling, not a base: interest across the top AI photo apps fell quickly from the mid-December peak. The question is whether this was a fad dying or a category rotating — and the later coverage points toward rotation.
First-order effects
- Prisma Labs loses the install and in-app purchase momentum that briefly made it the US App Store leader, and must either re-spark virality with new features or watch the $36/year subscription base churn down with engagement.
- App Store chart positions built on a single viral feature prove unstable, hitting every developer whose launch strategy was riding the same 'AI avatar' wave at once.
Second-order effects
- The flood of copycats chasing the same avatar format runs straight into the market-saturation problem documented for AI-based creative apps — too many near-identical products makes discovery harder for everyone, not just Lensa.
- Developer attention and marketing budgets rotate toward formats with retention instead of one-off novelty, a shift visible later in where AI app dollars actually landed.
Third-order effects
- The pattern splits the AI app economy in two: viral novelty apps spike and decay, while sustained consumer spending consolidates behind general-purpose assistants — the 200%+ growth in AI app spending by 2024 accrued to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Doubao, not photo-filter resurgences.
- If single-feature virality keeps proving non-durable, App Store economics favor apps built as ongoing utilities over apps built as trends, reshaping which AI products can sustain a subscription business.
The trend: Consumer AI is splitting into short-lived viral novelties and durable assistant utilities, with downloads spiking and collapsing fast while spending consolidates behind the utilities.