Does Anyone Want Beeper Mini, the App That's Tussling with Apple Right Now?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Beep Beep. Check out the full article for more insights.
We live in a world where green and blue bubbles can spark heated debates. That's a problem Beeper Mini is trying to solve by allowing Android users to send messages that appear as blue bubbles on iPhones.
Beeper does this by pretending to be an iPhone, and as you can probably imagine, Apple didn't like that. For the last few weeks, Apple has been actively closing every loophole Beeper found, sparking a big debate over the openness of iMessage.
But here's the real question - do people really want those blue bubbles that much?
Let's have a look at the downloads:
Since its release, Beeper Mini was downloaded 370K times from Google Play, according to our App Intelligence.
Beeper Mini had a strong opening with 66K downloads on day one and 274K downloads in its first week on Google Play. But the trend has been sloping down and fast.
The US led the way in downloads, contributing more than 57%, with India a distant second with 8% of the downloads. The UK, Canada, and Australia round out the top 5. Together, the three were responsible for roughly 40K downloads.
Daily downloads have dropped to just 8K on Thursday, according to our estimates.
This isn't a healthy trend, but Beeper Mini was never a legitimate solution, so I'm not too surprised.
In its first iteration, the service required full access to a user's Apple account, so Beeper could log into it on a Mac and send the message. Beeper found a better hack for its second go, which Apple shut down swiftly, leading to its current iteration that requires users to own a Mac.
Considering these downloads, I don't know if this is a battle worth fighting.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.
All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.