Meta has released seven new apps so far in 2026, including the AI personal assistant Muse, as it searches for a product that can match the reach of Facebook or Instagram in the AI era, Business Insider reported.

The releases range from experimental AI tools to a return to Meta’s photo-sharing origins. They include Instants, a Snapchat-style app for disappearing photos spun out of Instagram in May; Pocket, an AI “vibe-coding” app launched in the United States in August that lets users generate and share mini-games; and an AI bedtime-story app, Storytime, being tested in some regions, according to Business Insider.

Meta also shipped three new Facebook-branded apps this year: Forum, for groups; Seller, for Facebook Marketplace; and Creator Studio, for Facebook content creators, Business Insider reported.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has credited artificial intelligence with speeding up the company’s product development. “AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” he told investors on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call in July, according to a transcript of the call. “I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps, so we’re planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them to the people who will find them interesting, as we’ve done with Threads.”

Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, crossed 500 million monthly active users in the quarter, which Zuckerberg called the fastest-growing conversation app to date, according to the earnings call transcript. Meta had earlier confirmed the milestone on June 16, three years after Threads launched to compete with Twitter, Bloomberg reported.

Zuckerberg told investors in July that 3.6 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day, giving the company a base it can draw on to promote each new release, Business Insider reported. Meta used the same strategy of promoting new apps to existing Instagram and Facebook users to build up Threads, and has since run similar promotions for Muse inside Instagram.

Analysts see an advantage in scale

Amy Wu Martin, an investor at Menlo Ventures, said Meta was “constantly still trying to innovate.” She said that while AI has produced many new consumer app ideas industrywide, there have not been “a lot of winners yet,” leaving an opening for a company with Meta’s resources, according to Business Insider.

Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester, said Muse showed Meta “going back to its roots” by building “a very accessible, very friendly consumer-centric wrapper around technology that exists elsewhere,” she told Business Insider. Meta did not invent the AI personal-assistant category, where startups including Instinct, Town and Poke have also drawn attention, according to Business Insider.

Winick said Meta appeared to be applying lessons from earlier app failures by “putting the full might of the company” behind its newest releases.

A sprawl of apps, not one super app

Counting Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta now offers 14 apps, according to Business Insider’s count, which together would take up about half the screen of an iPhone if placed on a single page. Rather than folding these functions into one app, Meta is pursuing what Business Insider described as a sprawling approach of separate, single-purpose apps.

“In the Western markets at least, the super app has not been a form factor that has really taken hold,” Martin told Business Insider. “People want to use an app for a specific thing.” China’s WeChat operates as an all-in-one “super app,” and executives including Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have described similar ambitions for their own products, according to Business Insider.

Meta itself pursued a version of that strategy only a few years ago, expanding Instagram to include video, shopping and livestreaming features, Business Insider reported. The company ran a dedicated New Product Experimentation unit starting in 2019 to test and launch standalone apps, including social apps for music and couples, before deprioritizing the effort following layoffs in late 2022, according to Business Insider. It followed an earlier Facebook unit, Creative Labs, which launched a handful of apps in the 2010s.

Winick said the current approach amounted to Meta “really creating an ecosystem” rather than one large app. “And it’s persuasive,” she said.

Muse, introduced on Sept. 8, reached the top of Apple’s free App Store chart within 10 days and had drawn more than 2.5 million downloads by late September. Meta has since pushed the assistant into new territory: Zuckerberg announced a Meta Enterprise Platform on Sept. 28 built around Muse-branded business tools, and the company unveiled Muse for Small Business the following day, connecting the agent to software from Asana, Zoom, Intuit, Box, Canva and Slack, CNBC reported. Muse’s rapid expansion into personal data and business software has also drawn scrutiny over privacy and permissions, including an incident in which the agent disclosed a user’s address.