This Week in Apps #46 - Upside Down, Elon Musk Style
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.
Index
U.S. Mobile Download Index: App Store 98.71, Google Play 76.69
๐ While the stock market was raging this week, the Index remained relatively flat, albeit a tad negative, as back to school took away from game downloads across most genres.
Apps
1. Gamestonk!
The big story this week revolves around the stock market, Reddit, and GameStop. If you haven't heard yet, investors on Reddit were trying to show a short seller who's boss. The world wasn't ready for such a fight.
Robinhood, which established itself as the app for regular people, was where it mostly played out. After a tweet from kingmaker Musk, downloads exploded, lifting Robinhood and Reddit to the top of the App Store. We estimate the uplift to have brought on nearly a million new users to Robinhood this week, triple the previous week, and about a half of that for Reddit.
2. Everyone's doing it!
Early Thursday, Robinhood announced it'll stop trading GameStop. Investors who wanted to get in before the big squeeze flocked to other trading platforms. Trading apps, new and old, all inched their way up the ranks.
The more traditional Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and E*TRADE jumped into the top 20, and the more modern Webull, which takes on Robinhood directly, jumped to #2, right below Robinhood.
These jumps are as unprecedented for these apps as is everything that's happened with the stock market this week, and also a reminder of how users will jump ship when they feel they're being manipulated.
Most of these apps also stopped trading $GME at some point but resumed very quickly.
3. Taking on TikTok?
Done with finance!
This week, wannabe TikTok rival Clash acquired rival byte in an attempt to take on the king of short-form video.
I looked at the downloads to estimate just how credible of a threat this is, and (un)fortunately, it isn't.
In 2020, Clash, which is only available in the U.S., was download just about 400,000 times across the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. byte, which was released in January, had a much nicer year, bringing in an estimated 9.1M downloads.
We estimate that TikTok ended 2020 with 800,000,000 downloads.
4. Big in China x2
Speaking of TikTok...
In China, TikTok's home base, TikTok lite (ๆ้ณๆ้็ - ้้ณ็ฌฆๅ ๅฅฝ็คผ) jumped to the top of the App Store this week.
Downloads nearly quadrupled this week, from around 60K/day earlier in the month to more than 220K every day this week, according to our estimates.
The main TikTok app in China is sitting at #3, averaging 120K downloads per day, based on our estimates.
5. Did you bet on the big fight?
Last weekend, the UFC held a big fight between Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier, two big names in the UFC, for those, who like me, weren't aware.
Big names = big bets, giving betting app DraftKings a very big weekend in downloads.
The app, which sees about 2,500 downloads on a regular day, saw downloads more than triple to 29K and 34K on Saturday and Sunday, based on our estimates.
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.
