This Week in Apps - Screaming at Chickens?
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. Revenue Index (vs. 30 days ago)
Insights
1. Did Netflix Find a New Downloads Growth Hack?
Netflix pulled a Peacock move last week by getting into live sports - specifically, boxing, a sport not streamed by many.
And Netflix did it well, building up a lot of hype for the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul that culminated in the match last weekend.
Did it work?
Yes, it certainly did!
Looking at Appfigures download estimates for Netflix this year we can see two things.
The first is that downloads, which were very stable before the weekend, jumped by a lot. The second is that a lot, in this case, is nearly three million new downloads. That's more than twice the number of new downloads OG streamer gets in a typical Friday - Sunday.
If you're thinking, "oh, just double??", think again because most apps don't even get close to a million downloads a day. Unless you're TikTok, but Netflix isn't.
Friday contributed to a little over 1M downloads, Saturday added 1.2M, and 630K came in on Sunday, according to our estimates. Subtracting the expected downloads, we’re left with 1.7M new users who came in for the fight, which Netflix can now monetize.
Most downloads, 23% of the 2.9M total, came from the US where Google Play was responsible for about twice as many downloads as the App Store. India came in second and was the only other country with a double-digit share (12%). Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey round out the top 5, all with single-digit shares ranging between 9% and 5%.
Netflix is following Peacock's lead here with its entry into live sports, the new "hack" to grow in streaming. I expect to see more streamers do the same as we get into 2025.
2. TikTokers Screaming At Chickens Sent An Unlikely Game to #1 - The Most Downloaded Games in the World
How are the top mobile games in terms of scooping up new players doing? It's time to check out the latest monthly top 10 across the iOS App Store, Google Play, and overall rankings. One thing's for certain: October shook things up big time, largely thanks to TikTok.
At #1 for October downloads, Mini Games got a massive viral boost from TikTok. Videos of players guiding a clumsy chicken through tricky obstacle courses by shouting at it flooded the platform, showcasing tense moments and hilarious reactions. The hype was enough to dethrone Subway Surfers and nine other games, putting Mini Games on top.
Meanwhile, Superstore/Supermarket Simulator proved it’s still worth checking out. Though it couldn’t snatch the crown, it held firm at #2 on Google Play, climbed two spots on iOS, and added 2M downloads over September’s total. We have the receipts.
Rounding out the top five, Subway Surfers slipped to #3, Block Blast stayed steady at #4, and the surprisingly durable Hole.io returned to the #5 spot — an impressive feat for a six-year-old game.
Zooming out, October's top 10 combined for an estimated 146M downloads worldwide — up 11% from September. With the holidays just ahead, expect even more growth in November and December as players dive into these games (and plenty of others) during their downtime.
3. Who Took The Monopoly Money? - The Highest Earning Games in the World
As 2024 winds down, the latest numbers are in, showing growth requires lots of work as some mobile games are thriving while others hit a rough patch. Let's dive into October's data and see who's up — and who's down from September.
Yes, this is October's chart, although you might not guess it with the same #1 games still ruling the rankings. On iOS, Honor of Kings added $16M over September, bringing its revenue last month to $154M. Over on Google Play, Royal Match held tight to its crown, growing by $3M. Overall, Honor of Kings kept its throne, with $154M net — a $6M boost month-over-month.
In the rest of the top five, Royal Match stayed strong at #2, while Whiteout Survival and Game For Peace both climbed up. The big shake-up? Monopoly Go! tumbled from #2 to #5 as its net revenue dropped $15M to $100M. Scopely isn’t taking it lying down, rolling out TV spots starring Jason Momoa, Keke Palmer, Chris Pratt, and Will Ferrell (voicing Mr. Monopoly himself) to drum up more interest in the title.
Altogether, October's top 10 games pulled in $953M worldwide, inching closer to a $1B month. That’s $46M more than September’s total — a solid showing as the year heads into its final stretch.
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4. Who Will Gain from Google Selling Chrome?
Regulators in the US are forcing Google to sell Chrome, its web browser, to prevent being labeled a monopoly. It's one part of a bigger plan the Department of Justice has to break up Google's stronghold on online advertising.
Google has been under the gun for quite a while as the US government aims to make advertising online more fair. The latest move comes from the logic that Google has the most used web browser where Google is the search engine giving its ads for search platform an unfair advantage. Couple that with Google being the default search engine on the iPhone and you have yourself a monopoly - or so says the government.
On mobile, much like the web, Chrome has the highest market share in terms of new downloads.
How big is its share? Who stands to gain the most if Chrome changes hands? And, which platform consumes more 3rd party browsers?
Let’s have a look at the downloads.
I compared the downloads of the top browsers this year, which include Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Brave, and it's clear that Chrome is the biggest in terms of downloads. It accounted for 35% of the downloads within the top 5 in 2024.
Appfigures estimates show that Chrome saw nearly 70M new downloads so far in 2024, and we expect it to end the year with 80M. That's more than twice as many downloads as second place Microsoft Edge saw in the same period.
It's interesting to see Chrome's biggest market is iPhones while it's the exact opposite for everyone else. That's a clear indication of which users are most important to Google.
Edge and Opera are seeing almost identical downloads at a little under 40M each, and we expect them to grow enough to beat last year's downloads. The two stand the most to gain from Chrome's unknown future.
Wait, why would they gain??
Well... Looking at Chrome's downloads trend, it's very clear something happened this year, and downloads are dropping fast. Although the year started with high downloads - higher than 2023's - downloads declined as the government's pressure on Google rose. As of October, downloads were down 14% vs last year and November is looking much worse.
That suggests Google has pumped the breaks on user acquisition, or at least slowed it down, because to Google Chrome being owned anyone else has no value so there's no reason to grow it for now.
And that's a big opportunity for its competitors. Who do you think will take the crown?
5. Bluesky Hit 20M Users and Overtook X in App Downloads for the First Time
Bluesky, the other X, has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks because it started getting popular on and after Election Day.
How popular? Enough to make it the top app in the US (and other countries), help it cross 20M users, and start getting more daily downloads than rival X - a lot more.
A few weeks ago I said that Bluesky has an Elon problem. Bluesky doesn't seem to agree, so let's have a look at app downloads an see if that's still the case.
Our App Intelligence shows that Bluesky was downloaded a smidge over 16M times since it was released to the App Store and Google Play back in 2023. But... Looking at the trend, there's a clear change this year.
You might be thinking that's the result of Bluesky opening up to the public back in February, but the big change actually came in late August. In fact, the majority of Blueky's downloads, over 11M (~70%) came in between the end of August and the end of November.
Before elections week, Blueky's daily downloads were fairly low but peaked when something happened with X, but that's changed since the elections.
Looking at Bluesky's downloads trend show they've shifted up drastically, from around 2,000 per day before the summer to more than 400,000 every day in the last few weeks - and that's a conservative estimate. I don't think you need me to turn that into percent, but if you do, that's roughly a 19,900% increase.
X saw about 275K downloads per day on average before the elections and rose a bit to a little over 300K over the last few weeks, but that's going back to normal as of this weekend. Bluesky's downloads are dropping as well, going from a peak of 490K down to 340K on Saturday. Still vastly different than the before days.
Does Bluesky still have an Elon problem?
Yes. And I don't mean to take sides here (I'm on both) but rather think about both as businesses.
Bluesky's rise, even this latest wave, is a direct result of Elon being political. Not an algorithm change, not feature improvements, and not a clever evolution of the platform - the two are still fairly identical in the bits and bytes. Oh, and Bluesky's main difference, that it's distributed, isn't a feature most new users even understand, so I wouldn't call it a mass market differentiator.
It's possible that with enough of these waves of signups Bluesky will eventually get enough momentum to grow on its own, but what happens if people forget about politics?
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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.
