Meta has released seven apps this year. Creators got Creator Studio

In 2026 Meta released seven new mobile apps, from Instants in May to Facebook Creator Studio in August and the AI assistant Muse in September. CEO Mark Zuckerberg linked the pace of launches on the July earnings call to AI, which he said significantly shortens the time from idea to released app. Together with its existing portfolio, Meta runs fourteen apps in all, with a user base of 3.6 billion daily users.

This year's launches are captured in Sensor Tower data, cited in a Business Insider report. They were Instants (13 May), a Snapchat-like app launched from Instagram; Forum (22 May) for Facebook groups; Pocket (29 June), a vibe-coding social app; StoryKit (21 July), an AI tool for fairy tales; Seller (24 July) for Facebook Marketplace; Creator Studio (12 August) for content creators; and the AI assistant Muse (8 September).

Threads opened the way for new launches

This year's portfolio expansion follows on from Threads, launched in July 2023 as an alternative to X. In July 2026 Zuckerberg announced that the platform had passed 500 million monthly active users. He called it “the fastest-growing conversation app ever.” Advertising on Threads launched in early 2026.

Throughout the 2010s Meta ran a team called Creative Labs with several experimental products, and eventually shut them all down. In 2019 the NPE organisation was created (New Product Experimentation), testing formats from live broadcasts to social apps for couples and music. After the layoffs at the end of 2022, Meta wound down its NPE activities. Threads shifted the balance. “They're constantly still trying to innovate,” Amy Wu Martin of Menlo Ventures told Business Insider.

AI is speeding up product development

“AI is helping our teams speed up product development. 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,” Zuckerberg told investors on the July earnings call.

Pocket, released on 29 June, is a vibe-coding social app that combines AI-assisted programming with community distribution. Muse, released on 8 September as a personal AI assistant, which marketers promptly turned into a research tool for Reels, is entering a space where, according to Business Insider, it competes with startups such as Instinct, Town and Poke. Wu Martin noted that in AI consumer apps “there haven't been a lot of winners yet.”

Meta enters with a distribution lever that startups lack. It promotes its new apps across its existing portfolio. In recent weeks Muse has been showing up as an ad directly in Instagram. Meta used the same strategy to move users from Instagram and Facebook to Threads.

Kate Winick, principal analyst at Forrester, sees Muse as a return to basics. Meta, she says, “is figuring out how to put a very accessible, very friendly consumer-centric wrapper around technology that exists elsewhere.”

Specialised apps instead of one super app

Instead of one app for everything, Meta has bet on specialisation. “In the Western markets at least, the super app has not been a form factor that has really taken hold. People want to use an app for a specific thing,” Wu Martin summed up for Business Insider. Elon Musk with X and Satya Nadella with Microsoft have both shared super app aspirations. In the Western market none of them has yet succeeded. WeChat as a model works specifically in the Chinese ecosystem.

The result of the portfolio strategy is functional specialisation. Instants serves ephemeral photo communication, Seller handles Marketplace sellers without the noise of the main Facebook, and Creator Studio manages creators' content on Facebook. Alongside the apps, Meta is building other tools around creators too; this year it launched globally the Creator Marketing Hub, which turns a creator's post into an ad draft. “They're really creating an ecosystem instead of one massive app. And it's persuasive,” Winick called the result. According to Business Insider, Meta is also considering how to support the model of specialised apps with subscription bundles.

Direct competitors in the creator tools space, TikTok Creator Academy and Snap Creator Hub, have integrated analytics and monetisation into their platforms. Creator Studio comes with content management separated into a standalone app. According to Winick, Meta has learned from earlier failures and is surrounding its new products with “the full might of the company.”

The DMA and new Meta apps in the EU

Since September 2023 Meta has held gatekeeper status under the DMA for six of its key platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Marketplace and its advertising systems). The obligations include a ban on self-preferencing, interoperability with third parties and limits on combining personal data across products.

The new apps (Muse, Instants, Creator Studio or Pocket) are not yet affected by DMA status. If they reach sufficient penetration in the EU, the European Commission may assess adding them to the core platform services and extending the obligations.

The success of this year's portfolio depends on how many of the new apps achieve the scale that Threads managed.