This Week in Apps #20 - Sports Make a Comeback, an All-Time High for Pokémon Go, and more

Ariel Ariel
2 minute read 7/31/20

This Week in Apps is a short, no-fluff, round-up of interesting things that happened in the mobile industry. Here are our top highlights.

U.S. Mobile Download Index: App Store 86.27, Google Play 92.54


Shields up

T-Mobile gave its Scam Shield app a serious update last week and made some useful features free. Disliking robocalls and unwanted calls, T-Mobile customers didn't think twice before downloading it, pushing the app to #1 the U.S. App Store and earning it an estimated 150,000 downloads across both platforms.

Slam dunk

Basketball's back, and everyone is excited about it! So excited that they're subscribing to watch games using the NBA app at a rate like never before.

Last Thursday, the NBA's mobile app recorded a new all-time high earning $206,000 in a single day in the U.S. App Store according to our estimates. The previous all-time high, at the end of October of 2019, was $169,000, based on our app intelligence data.

NBA x2

Another winner from the NBA's restart is TV channel TNT, which has streaming rights for NBA games. On Thursday, TNT's streaming app started climbing the top charts in the App Store, where it's now #3 in the Entertainment category. They started the week at #130.

Caught 'em

Last week I highlighted Pokémon Go's all-time high for single-day downloads, and this week there's another—Revenue! Excited for Go Fest, U.S. players showed just how much they love the game with their wallets. The game hit a new all-time high on Saturday, with an estimated $1.7 million in revenue in the U.S. App Store.

Overall, we estimate Go Fest weekend generated $4.9 million in revenue for Niantic and Nintendo.

Wait, who???

While all eyes are normally on TikTok, another app has been gaining a lot of momentum, and revenue, by letting people live-stream their lives.

The app is called BIGO Live, and since the beginning of 2020, they've nearly doubled their revenue in the U.S. App Store - to nearly $2 million per week, based on our revenue estimates.

And yes, BIGO Live is owned by a Chinese company and has been banned in India.

That's it for this week. Get these insights by email by subscribing to the newsletter.

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.

Tagged: #twia #covid-19

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