{"id":102168,"date":"2025-10-24T20:26:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/102168\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T20:26:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:26:08","slug":"openais-sora-loses-its-top-app-store-ranking-to-daves-hot-chicken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/102168\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI’s Sora Loses Its Top App Store Ranking to Dave’s Hot Chicken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since its launch on September 30, OpenAI\u2019s Sora app<\/a> has dominated the iOS App Store charts, thanks to its easy breezy AI video generation and an initially loose interpretation<\/a> of copyright laws. On Friday, its reign came to an end. Your new champion is \u2026 Dave\u2019s Hot Chicken.<\/p>\n

Yes! Not ChatGPT<\/a> or Gemini<\/a> or Threads<\/a> or any of the other usual suspects. Dave\u2019s Hot Chicken now rules over the App Store, where its slack-beaked, bug-eyed mascot icon expresses appropriate surprise at its ascent. How did it do it? How did it break the grasp of OpenAI\u2019s golem TikTok? With something people love even more than large language models: free food.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re running a promotion for free sliders in celebration of Drake\u2019s birthday,\u201d says Adam Blacker, PR director of the app analytics firm Apptopia. \u201cFree food always gets the downloads flowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re wondering what Drake has to do with any of this, he invested in the fast casual restaurant chain in 2021, and presumably made a mint when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for a reported<\/a> $1 billion. For the third consecutive year, the company gave away one (1) free slider to anyone who has downloaded the app in honor of Drake\u2019s birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today; the giveaway was Thursday.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re celebrating a celebrity that\u2019s popular and that\u2019s currently relevant, and also getting food in people\u2019s mouths,\u201d says Dave\u2019s Hot Chicken chief technology officer Leon Davoyan.<\/p>\n

And it truly is a lot of people. On a typical week, Davoyan says, Dave\u2019s sees between 20,000 and 25,000 new sign-ups to its loyalty database. On Thursday alone the promotion drove 343,531 new accounts\u2014a more than 10 percent bump to the brand\u2019s overall membership in a single day, according to the CTO.<\/p>\n

It was enough to knock Sora out of the top slot for the first time since October 3, an impressive stretch for an app that\u2019s still invite-only. In the first 23 days since it launched, Sora racked up 3.2 million iOS downloads in the US, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower. That\u2019s a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which while similarly viral notched 2.3 million US downloads in the same time. (Sora is not yet available in the Google Play Store, but it’s incoming.) OpenAI declined to comment.<\/p>\n

While Sora is likely to reclaim the top spot after the Drake promotion dies down, Dave\u2019s Hot Chicken should continue reaping the benefits of its giveaway. Last year, according to Sensor Tower, downloads of the app in the four weeks following the same marketing push were more than 50 percent higher than the month leading up to it. All those free sandwiches are worth the long-term gains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since its launch on September 30, OpenAI\u2019s Sora app has dominated the iOS App Store charts, thanks to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,17980,2078,218,219,12176,426,61,60,1682,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-102168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-app-store","10":"tag-apps","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-chicken","14":"tag-food","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-openai","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}