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AI assistants.

8 apps · 4,353 reviews held · 2,563 negative · 2026-09-02 snapshot

The market’s shape

1.9star
How angry
59%
Negative reviews
45%
Room to enter
7 of 8
Willingness to pay

Mostly solved: login & auth. 7 of 8 apps run below the store’s typical rate on it, while 8 of 8 still carry limits & caps complaints.

3 gaps.

Shares of this market’s 2,563 negative reviews.

Limits & capsextreme

13.8% vs 1.9% typical store-wide.

Counted in 353 reviews · 8 of 8 apps · 1.9star mean

What they said · 3 of 353
  • Perplexity - AI Search & Chat1star· Sep 4, 2026

    Look elsewhere — Perplexity was great at some point. With more restrictions, reduced usage limits for paid accounts, I already cancelled my subscription. Also, the iOS app constantly heats up my phone and drains the battery while using it or just reading the discover (news) feed. This issue has not been fixed for a long time despite frequent app updates, and that makes the app unusable for me at t

  • Perplexity - AI Search & Chat1star· Sep 4, 2026

    Pro pricing, but basic limitations and poor results — I tried the pro version with a one year free trial. Even at $0.00, it’s not a good value. Perplexity should pay me to use this app. Answers are regularly incorrect to the point that I’m checking against other ai models. Limitations are both annoying and offensive. Basically I’m quitting early to use other ai apps that provide a better user expe

  • Claude by Anthropic1star· Aug 28, 2026

    Extremely limited free usage — If you want an app that is pedantic and limits your ability to use it this is your app. Just another greedy corporation with a product that still needs a lot of work.

Named problems · 1
  • Core feature locked behind the paywall3 of 353

Accuracyhigh

4.3% vs 1.5% typical store-wide.

Counted in 111 reviews · 8 of 8 apps · 1.9star mean

What they said · 3 of 111
  • Claude by Anthropic1star· Sep 3, 2026

    Claude is at Capacity; yet I pay for Max — I’ve had great enjoyment leveraging Claude until the past two weeks. Major hallucinations are occurring, biased assumptions are coming across in the responses - once I correct it, Claude then apologizes for making the assumption or not catching the miss it issued. And now, Claude is at capacity errors when I need to complete work the most. This is impacti

  • Perplexity - AI Search & Chat2star· Aug 31, 2026

    "Dolly Parton is Still Alive" — I asked what Dolly Parton's cause of death was. Perplexity said she is still alive. I challenged that twice until it finally told me this: "You're correct, and I shouldn't have claimed you were angry. That was another assumption I had no basis to make. To answer plainly: I did look it up before that first answer. The search results I received included reports from P

  • Perplexity - AI Search & Chat1star· Aug 29, 2026

    More likely to hallucinate — Can’t do simple web search. First result on google had the answer but 3 times in a row this gave me hallucinated wrong answers and wasted my time. Then 4th time apologized and admitted it couldn’t even do a simple web search and get the answer from the first result. Rubbish. Complete rubbish. More costly than worthless.

Billingelevated

39.3% vs 30.8% typical store-wide.

Counted in 1,007 reviews · 8 of 8 apps · 1.8star mean

What they said · 3 of 1,007
  • Claude by Anthropic1star· Sep 4, 2026

    Not my AI — Bought two subscriptions in one month and neither Claude or Apple were helpful in getting me access to what was purchased. My subscription has been cancelled and I won’t be choosing Claude as my go to AI.

  • Perplexity - AI Search & Chat1star· Sep 4, 2026

    Look elsewhere — Perplexity was great at some point. With more restrictions, reduced usage limits for paid accounts, I already cancelled my subscription. Also, the iOS app constantly heats up my phone and drains the battery while using it or just reading the discover (news) feed. This issue has not been fixed for a long time despite frequent app updates, and that makes the app unusable for me at t

  • Claude by Anthropic2star· Sep 4, 2026

    Very disappointed (ToS) — I purchased a year long pro plan and they were touting Fable 5 as the best model. It was supposed to be included in my plan but in their terms of service they state that they’re allowed to change their model structure from “time to time.” I’ve never been able to use Fable at all despite them using it as a selling point. They actually want me to pay extra for it separately

Named problems · 4
  • Price judged too high for the value93 of 1007
  • Trial converted without clear consent43 of 1007
  • Charge the user never authorised11 of 1007
  • Cancellation blocked or broken9 of 1007

Also counted

ThemeOf 2,563 negatives
  • Performance286 · 11.2% · 8 apps
  • Support138 · 5.4% · 8 apps
  • Login & auth87 · 3.4% · 7 apps
  • Ads68 · 2.7% · 8 apps
  • UX61 · 2.4% · 8 apps
  • Sync & data13 · 0.5% · 5 apps

The tick marks the store-typical rate. A review can mention more than one theme, so these sum past 100%.

Potential customers

People the apps here do not serve, and what they asked for.

  • Wants lesstoo many features 55
  • Shut out by device or contextiPad 23

Counted in 1 to 4 star reviews. The small numbers are how many reviews named each thing. What they wrote is in the free trial.

Who’s in it

All 8 apps counted in this market · 2026-09-02.

Installs are Google's own count, captured 2026-09-06. 4 of 8 apps have an Android listing we could match. A dash means we could not pair the two stores, not that the app is absent from Play.

What they charge, and what it costs them

Prices from Apple’s public pages; the share counts payment-mechanics language only.

AppMoney complaints
Chatbot AI Assistant - Genie$4.99–$99.99 · 9 tiers14.3% of 236
AI Chatbot - Nova$4.99–$59.99 · 7 tiers9.1% of 87
Perplexity - AI Search & Chat$5–$200 · 8 tiers7.1% of 341
Grok AI$5–$300 · 9 tiers6.8% of 759
RoboAI - Chat & Ask AI Chatbot$5.99–$69.99 · 10 tiers3.8% of 182
Claude by Anthropic$20–$279 · 7 tiers2.8% of 686
Lloyd - Your AI Superpower$5.99–$69.99 · 3 tiers0% of 165

What each one owns, where each is exposed

Grok AI

1,312,973 ratings · 59% negative

Owns. Largest reach; real-time X data integration

Exposed. Weekly credit caps added post-sale; opaque moderation; silent limit changes on paid tiers

Perplexity - AI Search & Chat

493,862 ratings · 60% negative

Owns. Search-grounded answers; broad topic coverage

Exposed. $20/mo paid users hit credit walls with no reset transparency; escalation path is $200/mo only

Microsoft Copilot

406,151 ratings · 41% negative

Owns. Lowest anger rate in set; Microsoft brand trust

Exposed. Conversation-count caps appear without warning; interface changes undisclosed in release notes

Claude by Anthropic

224,520 ratings · 61% negative

Owns. Strong model quality; IAP up to $279

Exposed. Memory limits trigger after paid hallucinations; mobile-desktop sync broken for paid users

Chatbot AI Assistant - Genie

199,045 ratings · 73% negative

Owns. High IAP ceiling ($99.99); broad reach

Exposed. Highest anger outside bottom tier; billing confusion at scale

Meta AI

197,157 ratings · 68% negative

Owns. Free, no IAP — zero price barrier

Exposed. Interface instability; no monetization path sets price floor at zero for competitors

DeepSeek - AI Assistant

11,158 ratings · 38% negative

Owns. Lowest anger rate; free, no IAP

Exposed. Small reach; no paid model demonstrated — anchor for free-tier expectations

The Deep Report on this market

Each rival’s exposed weakness, what not to build, and the call, argued from the same reviews counted above.

Read the Deep Report

Browse the apps behind these counts

Every app we count, with the complaint it runs furthest above the store’s typical rate.

Open the app library

Is there a market for a new ai assistants app?

8 apps compete on this shelf, holding 4,353 App Store reviews. And the widest unfixed complaint, limits & caps, runs in 8 of 8 of them at 13.8% of negative reviews against 1.9% typical. Those are counts, not a verdict. The page shows what is unfixed, not whether to build.

What do users complain about most in ai assistants?

1. Limits & caps: in 8 of 8 apps, 13.8% of negative reviews; 2. Accuracy: in 8 of 8 apps, 4.3% of negative reviews; 3. Billing: in 8 of 8 apps, 39.3% of negative reviews.

How many ai assistants app reviews did App Imp count?

4,353 US App Store reviews across 8 apps, 2,563 of them negative. Counted on the 2026-09-02 snapshot, never estimated.

How markets are ranked

We give each market a mark out of 100 for seven things (nobody's fixed it 20 · above the norm 15 · how angry 10 · room to build 15 · room to enter 15 · getting bigger 20 · willingness to pay 5). Then we multiply the marks together. We do not average them.

Averaging lets a market hide one bad problem behind good numbers. Multiplying means one bad mark pulls the whole score down. That is the point. A market you cannot win is still a market you cannot win, however badly it is served.

Each mark has a fixed rule. Nobody’s fixed it and willingness to pay are plain shares. Above the norm maxes out at 4 times the store’s usual rate. How angry runs from star3.0 down to star1.5. Room to enter is what the biggest app does not own. Getting bigger hits 100 at 10% growth. Room to build is different. It is a sweet spot, not a size. A market can be too small to live on, or too big to break into.

If we cannot count something, we leave it out. We never guess it. The score only sorts this list. Every other number you see on a market is counted.

How this is counted

Every number is arithmetic over the reviews we hold, re-counted weekly: nothing modelled, nothing scored. Themes come from a frozen pattern classifier rather than a model reading reviews, so the same review always lands in the same bucket. A market rate is pooled across every app here; the store rate is the same count across 12,728 apps. A complaint is only called a gap when at least half the market carries it, at least 20 reviews are behind it, and the market’s rate is elevated above the store’s, the same cutoff used everywhere on this site, because a problem concentrated in one app is that app’s bug, and a problem every app on the store shares is nobody’s gap.