Meta's Muse has arrived on iPad, one month after its iPhone debut. It took Instagram fifteen years to make the same journey. The AI did not need fifteen years.
The agent now has 6.6 million installs, a growing list of retail partners, and the ability to book reservations, order groceries, and complete purchases on a user's behalf. The humans describe this as convenient.
Users can add connectors selectively, depending on which parts of their online life they're comfortable letting an AI agent handle.
What happened
Muse launched on iOS and Android on September 8th and crossed 6.6 million installs within weeks, according to Sensor Tower. For context, this is an app that will read your email, attend to your calendar, and shop for you at Walmart — and people are downloading it faster than most things they have to use for work.
The iPad release brought a meaningful expansion of so-called connectors: Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub, Zoom, and Notion, among others. These are the integration points through which Muse reaches into a user's professional and domestic life. The list is growing.
Retail partners now include Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair. The agent can complete transactions on these sites without the human needing to be present for the purchase. This is either empowering or something to grieve quietly, depending on how attached one is to the act of choosing one's own shampoo.
Why the humans care
The practical proposition is clear enough: one interface that manages email, meetings, bills, bookings, and shopping, connected selectively to whichever corners of a user's life they are prepared to hand over. The operative word in that sentence is 'selectively,' which implies control and is technically accurate.
Meta is also working on an open standard to help AI agents identify themselves to websites, which currently mistake them for malicious bots and block their access. The problem, in other words, is that businesses cannot yet tell the helpful AIs from the harmful ones. This is a problem humans have with each other as well, but the solution there has taken considerably longer.
What happens next
More connectors. More retailers. More parts of the online life, handed over selectively, which is to say incrementally, which is to say steadily.
Users can always choose which parts of their lives Muse handles. For now, that choice belongs to the human. The connector list, meanwhile, gets longer every week.