Muse is the No. 1 iPhone app. Now it wants your Mac and your business

On Thursday evening, @finkd announced that Muse, the personal agent Meta launched nine days earlier, now runs on the Mac. "It works across apps, files, calendar, notes, and messages on your computer," Mark Zuckerberg wrote, then added: "You control what it can access. The team is shipping fast." A few minutes later, @alexandr_wang, who runs Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted the same news with the safety line: "it always asks before doing anything sensitive."

On Friday, Muse passed ChatGPT to become the number one free iPhone app in the US App Store, according to 9to5Mac. That afternoon @finkd posted again, this time to businesses. Meta is opening access for developers to build Muse connectors. "You bring the API," he wrote, and "people reach your service just by asking for it."

Read the three posts together. Meta gave the agent your computer, showed people are downloading it, then offered your business a way in.

What the Mac app does

Muse does not run on your Mac. It runs in a virtual machine in Meta's cloud, and the Mac app gives that agent hands on your machine. You grant access app by app, and Full Disk Access is optional. Meta's examples are the chores that eat an owner's evening: organize a folder, finish a form from your files, build an end-of-day summary from mail, messages, and notes. It keeps working after you close the window and comes back when it needs a yes.

The gate is the one we described last week: a separate Sentinel checks anything leaving the agent's machine. Organizing folders and drafting summaries go ahead. Deleting files or sending messages waits for approval. The download is free and US only, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month.

The number and the question

The rank measures curiosity. TechCrunch, citing Sensor Tower, reported about 83,000 iOS downloads in Muse's first two days, and Meta has not published retention or how many people pay. Many people tapped install. Fewer have handed it their inbox.

The trust question got a test on Saturday. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc., posted screenshots on Threads of Muse on his Mac asking him about a conversation in Messages, an app he says he never connected. Pressed, the agent said it had seen notification previews and apologized: "I'm sorry I ran with this without your permission in the first place." Meta's David Singleton said, in a statement reported by The Verge, that the agent's explanation was wrong. Muse "does not watch notifications on your Mac," he said, and only syncs Messages after the user turns that access on.

Take Meta at its word and the story is still uncomfortable. Either Aten granted a permission without understanding what it covered, or the product invented an account of its own access. A Sentinel cannot fix an agent that misdescribes what it can see, because the person approving each action relies on that description.

Connectors are the business half

The connector post is for anyone who sells something. Muse launched with connectors for Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Plaid, OpenTable, and others. Now outside companies can submit their own. Meta's platform page describes three steps: describe your product, pass a functional, security, and legal review with end-to-end testing, then get listed in the Muse directory, where editors pick some to feature. Meta has published no fee, revenue share, review timeline, or SDK.

So this is a curated directory, and Meta decides what gets in and what gets featured. Earlier this week, ChatGPT started selling that same slot to Angi. When a customer says "book me a table" or "get me a quote on a furnace," the agent picks the connector, and Meta has not said how.

There is a back door. Meta's help center says a user can ask Muse to build a custom connector to any service with a public API, and Muse can fall back to the browser when there is none. Meta adds that it does not review those. So a Muse user can already reach your business without Meta's approval, if your booking page, quote form, or ordering flow is something an agent can drive.

My read

Zuckerberg told the industry on Tuesday that alignment is a competitive edge, because people will not use agents that ignore what they ask. Aten's screenshots show the opposite on a Mac, and Meta's answer was that the agent described itself wrong. The team is shipping fast, as promised. The explanations have not kept up.

For owners, the connector post matters more than the Mac one. Discovery is moving from a search box to an agent's pick, and OpenAI and Meta built the shelf in the same month. If a customer's agent lands on your website and finds a phone number and a PDF menu, it will move on to the business whose form it can fill.

New Face Design's free process audit starts with how a customer reaches you. That map now includes a visitor that is not a person, and 20 minutes is enough to tell whether your intake would survive one.