This Week in Apps - Native or Non-Native?

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.

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U.S. Revenue Index (vs. 30 days ago)

Insights

1. Non-Native Development Trends - Will React Native's New Architecture Take the Lead Away from Flutter?

Meta has recently released the New Architecture for React Native, a project that started back in 2018 to make React Native faster and smoother by enabling synchronous communication between its code and the native code - what non-native development is most criticized for lacking.

The debate between native and non-native app development has been raging for years, but that hasn't stopped developers from leveraging React Native and other non-native frameworks to produce apps at an increasing rate.

According to our SDKs leaderboard, React Native is now the #1 non-native framework on the App Store and 2nd on Google Play following the native alternatives (Swift and Kotlin). Looking at apps released this year, this makes a lot of sense.

That's what apps currently on the App Store and Google Play are using right now, but there's another interesting view I look at when asked if it's worth going native or not:

Based on our SDK intelligence, a little under 7% of all apps released so far in 2024 (Jan - Oct) use React Native. Rival Flutter is at 11%. Both have grown their share over the last few years while all other competitors have been on the decline.

React Native's share rose from 4.73% in 2022 to 6.75% so far in 2024 while Flutter's rose from 10.15% to 11.07%, respectively.

Unity, Cordova, and Ionic's numbers are all down, which means either developers are moving to native development more or developers are choosing RN or Flutter for their non-native development instead of the others.

Comparing the share of native apps, which actually went down by a smidge, I believe it's the latter - the market is focusing on React Native and Flutter, and that's pretty big.

Yes, I know Unity is only for games which are a smaller category than apps. I chose to include it because its share is large enough.

I haven't seen the new architecture in action just yet but expect that if performance is what Meta is focusing on it'll happen. And that leads me to believe more developers will find this update exciting and increase the rate of development even more, maybe even taking over Flutter.

But wait, where's the money?

You didn't think I'd do an analysis like this and not look at the more important side of apps - making money, right?

I rounded up all apps (and even games) currently using React Native and Flutter, the two clear winners of the pack, and analyzed their revenue. We estimate that together, apps using React Native and Flutter generated $570M of net revenue, what developers keep after Apple's and Google's fees, in the last 30 days.

Which framework powered more revenue? I can tell you if I didn't see these numbers first I'd guess differently, but to my surprise, the two were nearly equal. Our estimates show React Native was responsible for $287M while Flutter for $283M.

And the distribution was pretty even between the two across all revenue levels.

Our estimates show that 790 React Native apps generated between $10K and $100K of net revenue, 255 generated between $100K and $1M and 173 generated $1M+ - and that's all net revenue, which is what the developers get to take home after fees.

The figures are almost identical, though a teeny tiny bit lower for Flutter with 727, 241, and 37, respectively.

Non-native development is here to stay and this race is pretty tight. Can React Native take over with the new architecture? We'll have to wait and see.

2. Does Anyone Need an AI Browser? Arc Goes into the Ice Box...

A few days ago The Browser Company announced it's putting Arc, the AI browser they released just a few months ago, into maintenance mode so they can focus on a new browser.

The announcement surprised a decent number of my X stream, but having followed Arc since its underwhelming release in January, I'm not very surprised.

Last time I looked at Arc, back in early March, it already amassed close to a half million downloads in roughly a month on the App Store. Things looked good, and there was a lot of good will on social media towards the company, which was very open and responsive.

I personally found the app a bit too confusing for my needs, enough to not be a daily user, but that's the nature of being (r)evolutionary, right? Maybe?

Well, we're about 8 months later now and Arc's total downloads, according to our App Intelligence, sit at 1.4M. Those are App Store downloads, where the app was launched initially. An Android version launched on Google Play a few months ago, but the numbers there are small enough to not be relevant to where I'm going with this analysis.

Looking at the trend, it's very obvious the excitement is all but gone, and that's been the case fairly early into the rollout.

Daily downloads peaked at 48K in early February for just a single day, but very quickly declined to an average of under 10% for a few weeks, around 4K, which then dropped down to around 2.5K since early July.

Last week, daily downloads dropped to around 1.5K, according to our estimates.

So when Josh, the CEO, announced they're moving on to a new browser, I wasn't at all surprised. ASO and paid advertising could have certainly helped Arc's numbers, but the main challenge is competing with a built-in browser (Safari) and the world's most popular browser (Chrome) with a browser that is simply too complicated for most people.

While adding "AI" to apps these days seems to make them more exciting, something as core as a browser requires more than just a keyword to convert existing users of incumbents, and I hope that's what the new browser will be - combining the good from Arc with a simplified version of the complicated.

I don't think the market needs another browser, but without new entrants there will be no innovation, so I salute the team at The Browser Company for taking on giants to improve the experience.

3. Bluesky Gets Serious and Raises $15M - But I See a Problem

It's been a very interesting time for Bluesky, the other twitter, recently. The platform opened up in February, and after lots of ups and downs, is joining the rest of its competitors and rolling out a paid tier. It also just took a $15M investment round last week.

Can Bluesky, which started with Twitter's original co-founder Jack Dorsey, become a major player in the (pretty static) world of social media?

You know how I answer these questions - Here's a look at Bluesky's journey from its lukewarm rollout to adding hundreds of thousands of new mobile users in a single day a few weeks ago.

Bluesky launched as invite-only back in February of 2023, and operated that way for a whole year. While in private mode, Bluesky's mobile app was downloaded 3.6M times between the App Store and Google Play. When Bluesky opened to the public, downloads climbed to 135K, which felt high but not as high as some, including me, expected.

The thing is, that was the best day of downloads for quite a while, exactly 206 days later, when downloads finally beat that initial peak. That day, at the end of August, earned Bluesky 331K downloads, according to our estimates, but was topped the next day with 420K estimated downloads and started a good month for Bluesky which resulted in 3.1M new downloads for the platform.

But the good run ended and downloads dropped down to just 4K daily downloads. Quite a big swing, but certainly better than the 206 days between peaks where downloads averaged just 1.2K per day.

A couple of weeks ago, Bluesky saw its biggest spike yet - 433K downloads in a single day. Downloads dropped the next day, but are still averaging 10x than what they did before the spike.

But Here's the Thing

Other than the long drought Bluesky saw for most of the year, it's latest spikes should be a great sign for investors, right? After all, since opening up to the public, the app was downloaded 6.8M times, according to our estimates. Add that to the pre-release downloads and we're looking at almost 10M downloads.

But...

Those spikes were not the result of great traction but rather a reaction to rival X. The first spike at the end of August was a result of X getting banned in Brazil. It eventually returned, however.

The more recent spike came after X announced a change to how blocking users works. The outrage was immediate, but it eventually ended.

When we look at the trend through that lens, it's clear that Bluesky's growth is a reaction to X and not necessarily its own traction. That's a pretty scary dependency, and that's what I think is Bluesky's problem.

For context, X saw the same number of downloads as Bluesky did since it was released in the last 30 days.

This might be a controversial opinion, but for Bluesky to succeed it needs to be more than just platform place people try out when they're unhappy with something Elon said. Until the, it's really at the mercy of X. And that's a problem.

I'm not hating on Bluesky here but rather hoping to see it flourish into something X isn't and give users a value-based reason to switch that isn't emotional. That's how it'll succeed.

4. Disney Pulled a Netflix and Won't Take New Mobile Subscriptions - How Much Will They Lose?

Disney+ and Hulu have stopped letting iPhone users subscribe through their mobile apps. The internet seems to align this move with a price increase both streaming services rolled out recently and it's seen as a way for Disney to grow their revenue - after all, Apple's 30% fee isn't small when you're one of the top grossing apps in the App Store.

But... Will users continue to subscribe without the one-tap convenience the App Store offers?

The question of whether the convenience and simplicity the App Store is worth its fee has been on many minds for quite some time, but even more so recently with changes in the EU that make it possible for more publishers.

I have some thoughts about this, but first, let's look at what Disney is jeopardizing by eliminating news subscriptions, which I'll do using our App Intelligence.

Our estimates show that consumers spent $528M on Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions on the App Store in Q3 of this year. Of that, Disney got to keep $370M and Apple took a whopping $159M.

Hulu was responsible for about 17% of that, in case you were wondering.

Q3's revenue for the pair was about 15% higher than Q2's, or roughly $50 of net revenue (after Apple's fees).

So while existing users will continue to pay Disney through Apple, there won't be any new subscribers coming in through the app directly, potentially losing the streamers as much as $50M of new revenue per quarter. That's if users simply won't make the jump to the site, which isn't likely.

The magic number of new revenue Disney and Hulu need to continue the same growth is $35M, at which point they'd be earning the same without fees vs going through the App Store with fees. I know there are some fees on credit cards, but they're much smaller so I'm ignoring those for the sake of simplicity.

Seems feasible, but is it really worth it?

Is Disney Treating the Symptom and Not the Cause?

If you've been following the series, you may already know my position on the success of streaming - it's all about the content. And when it comes to Disney+, after a strong rollout a few years ago full of great exclusives and overall subscriber growth, Disney slowed down with the releases and hasn't been giving users as many reasons to subscribe.

At the same time prices have been going up and the tiers have gotten a bit more complicated, leading to even more friction.

I see Disney's choice of leaving the App Store as a long-term mistake that would cost them even more than the 30% they were giving Apple. I'll check in on Disney+ in a few months to see what the data shows - that'll be the true test.

5. How Big is Character AI, the Companion App That's Getting Sued Right Now?

Character AI is one of the biggest companion AI apps right now. In fact, our App Intelligence shows it's 4th in downloads and 6th in revenue in the micro category of companion AI apps on the App Store right now and 2nd/14th on Google Play, respectively.

AI apps, especially the LLM kind, operate in somewhat of a gray area. It's all simple and nice when all it's being asked are technical questions or help with homework or recipes, but things get really dicey when you ask an LLM to be your friend.

That's the core of last week's sad news involving the app and a new lawsuit filed against it.

In case you aren't familiar, Character AI lets users customize chatbots they can interact with for entertainment purposes.

How many people do that? Quite a few...

We estimate that Character AI saw 35M downloads since it was released back in May of 2023. The majority of those downloads, roughly 71%, came from Google Play (but not the revenue, more on that below), while the App Store was responsible for 29%.

Looking at the trend, it seems that excitement for the app has risen sharply in the last few months, resulting in monthly downloads rising from roughly 1.1M during the first half of this year to more than 4M every month during the summer. An indication kids are a big part of its demographics.

With summer gone and school starting, downloads dropped again in September.

Revenue, unlike downloads, is led by the App Store, which was responsible for 65% of its $3.7M estimated net revenue since release. And just like downloads, revenue rose after being pretty flat, during the summer months, growing by as much as 50% between May and June.

At $9.99/mo, the only tier the app offers, and $400K of estimated gross revenue (before store fees) the app saw in September, we can estimate its got a little over 40K paying users. Our data further shows the majority of those paying users are based in the US.

I hate thinking about it this way, but that's a lot of potential lawsuits.

Setting a Precedent

I believe that the ethics of AI, especially unmoderated like that, will be the main focus for the next few years as the technology evolves and makes its way into everyday life, and this case could set a precedent.

On the one hand, it's hard to fault an LLM for not understanding subtexts that some humans wouldn't have understood in the same way. On the other hand, should LLMs be allowed to penetrate that deeply into our daily lives?

Character AI has added a new head of trust and safety to its ranks to prevent future incidents, a not-so-enviable position right now if you ask me, but a move I expect other larger competitors will follow before the year ends and in a weird way, a moat that will prevent smaller companies from entering this space.

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.

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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.