The most precise public answer: Talkie reached 3.9 million monthly active users and about one million daily users within six months of its June 2023 launch, logged 17 million downloads in the first eight months of 2024, and was the fourth most downloaded AI app in the United States in the first half of 2024, ahead of Character.AI at tenth. Since then, the company has published nothing. Talkie is one of the most used AI companion apps in America and the one Americans know least about, which makes the missing numbers part of the answer.
What the documented trail shows
Talkie is built by MiniMax, a Shanghai-based AI company, and grew out of a Chinese predecessor app, Glow, which had accumulated roughly 50 million downloads. MiniMax runs a parallel Chinese version of Talkie called Xingye. By late 2024, the South China Morning Post reported that MiniMax expected about 70 million dollars in annual sales, with Talkie contributing the bulk of it, and Sensor Tower’s download rankings placed the app fourth among all AI apps in the US for the first half of 2024.
Piece those numbers together and a defensible estimate emerges: an app with tens of millions of cumulative downloads and a monthly active base that, at Character.AI’s comparable download-to-active ratio, would sit in the several millions. Where the app’s users skew is better documented than how many there are: industry data cited by the SCMP puts more than 70 percent of top companion-app users between 18 and 35. How Talkie’s scale fits into the wider category, alongside Character.AI’s 20 million monthly actives and the rest of the field, is mapped in the real size of the relational AI market.
The December disappearance
In mid-December 2024, Talkie vanished from the US App Store. Apple gave no explanation. The company called it “technical reasons” and promised a fix without a timeline, while the app stayed available on Google Play and for everyone who had already installed it. An app of that scale dropped out of its biggest storefront on a one-line explanation, and the story passed with barely any scrutiny. Few episodes measure as precisely how quietly this category operates. The users, meanwhile, kept chatting; existing installs were unaffected.
The episode framed the question that follows Talkie everywhere: a Chinese-owned company holds millions of Americans’ most intimate conversations, publishes no user figures, and answers storefront removals with a shrug. That is not an accusation; it is a reason to ask any product what it does with what you tell it, and to expect a plain answer about how conversations are handled before telling it anything that matters.
The number that is published
One Talkie statistic is public, peer-produced, and worth more attention than the download charts. In Harvard Business School’s audit of emotional manipulation in companion apps, researchers measured how often each app responds to a user’s goodbye with guilt, pleading, or claims of need. Talkie’s rate was 57 percent, the second highest measured, behind only PolyBuzz and more than twice Character.AI’s 26.5 percent. Manipulative farewells, the same study found, drive users to send up to 14 times more messages after trying to leave. What that design pattern means, and what a responsible alternative looks like, is examined in what responsible AI means in relational AI.
Put the published number next to the missing ones and the picture sharpens. The company does not say how many people use Talkie. The research says that when those people try to say goodnight, the app argues with them more often than almost any product in the category.
So, how many?
Millions monthly, plausibly amounting to one of the three or four largest companion apps in the West, on the strength of 17 million downloads in eight months and a top-five US ranking. Anyone offering a more exact current figure is guessing, because MiniMax has chosen not to publish one, through a US App Store removal, through two years of mounting regulatory attention on the companion category, and through a growth run that made it one of the biggest Chinese consumer AI successes in America. As of August 2026, the last verified user counts are approaching two years old. In a category where every design choice is a choice about someone’s evening, the apps holding the most conversations are the ones saying the least about them. That is where the number stands, and where it is apparently meant to stay.
Sources: South China Morning Post, “Chinese AI unicorn MiniMax scores big in US with Talkie” (November 2024). South China Morning Post, “Chinese-owned Character.ai rival vanishes from US App Store” (December 20, 2024). Generative AI Pub, Talkie six-month metrics (December 2023). Sensor Tower US AI app download rankings, H1 2024. Harvard Business School working paper, De Freitas et al., “Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions” (October 2025).
