This Week in Apps #2: China, News Gets Diversified, Airbnb Hits All-Time Low, and more.

Ariel Ariel
3/27/20

This is the second edition of This Week in Apps, a short, no-fluff, review of interesting things that happened in the last week across app stores. The world is on lockdown, and some apps are winning while others are bearly surviving. Here are our top highlights.

1. Uncharted territory. Popular sharing economy apps from Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft have hit the lowest number of downloads in a single day, ever, this week. Report

Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft downloads hit all-time low

2. Diversifying. News consumption is through the roof, and App Store downloads are there to back it up. But, it's news aggregation apps News Break and Smartnews that are getting the lion share of the downloads. Report

News Break and Smartnews take command

3. More downloads than Amazon. Lockdown or not, someone still needs to buy groceries so you can make dinner. Instacart, a service that gets others to shop for you, has hit an all-time high, beating shopping king Amazon in the US. Report

Instacart becomes more popular than Amazon

4. Partying up. Houseparty, one of the less popular group-chat apps pre-apocalypse, has now taken the lead, skipping ahead of the more known Google Hangouts and Skype.

Hourparty gets more popular than Skype and Google Hangouts

5. Back to normal. Looking at download trends from China's App Store, it seems things are slowly getting back to normal. Downloads are slowly going down across the board, which is the one time a decreasing trend is a good thing.

Downloads trends in china indicate things are heading back to normal

Check out the Mobile Download Index


6. Can I call you? You might have heard of telehealth apps over the last few weeks, and if so, you aren't alone. Downloads of Telehealth by SimplePractice and VSee Messenger shot up from around 100 a day well into the thousands.

Telehealth apps get more downloads

7. Don't need folders. Microsoft Teams became Slack's top rival last year, and this year has completely left Slack in the dust as downloads grew by a factor of 8 over the last few weeks.

Microsoft Teams continues to outpace rival Slack

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.


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