Robinhood, too
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #71 - It's IPO Season Again. Check out the full article for more insights.
Last IPO for today is, again, a favorite app of mine--Robinhood. I've been a user of Robinhood for quite a while now and have been covering it here in the newsletter since launch. I even stuck with it during the Gamestop depression.
Robinhood's IPO has been in the air for a long, long time now, and it makes total sense. The app's unique approach to trading, by gamifying the experience, so it's accessible to mere mortals (aka retail investors) has earned it the kind of success traditional trading apps can't even get near.
Its road to IPO was a bit bumpy from a PR standpoint, but overall, downloads have been going in the up and to the right direction for long enough to make it the go-to investment app for many.
Before the pandemic, Robinhood saw a little more than 100K downloads every week across both platforms, but with the pandemic causing crazy variance, downloads grew drastically. According to our estimates, Robinhood's downloads peaked at more than 550K downloads per week in 2020, and it ended the year with more than 12.5M new downloads.
2021 was what I think will become the pivotal year for the app. It was already on a high from pandemic trading and then at the center of the WallStreetBets/Gamestop shenanigans, which helped it soar and also plunge, and then it got into crypto.
Good, bad, ugly, and pretty much everything in-between.
We're only in the middle of the year, and downloads are already very close to 2020. So far this year, Robinhood was downloaded by nearly 10M users across the App Store and Google Play, with multiple weekly peaks of more than 800K downloads, according to our estimates.
For comparison, traditional investment apps from Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and E*TRADE, together, added 5M downloads in 2021. A half! And that's higher than what they would have seen if there was no controversy with Robinhood.
If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that every time I mention Robinhood, I also talk about how it's becoming a household name and how that's what's going to make it ubiquitous. An IPO will certainly solidify that.
As an app-first company, Robinhood's success will be closely tied to new downloads as it seeks to tap the growing market of mere mortal investors. I'll be keeping a close watch on that (and you can too with our affordable app intelligence)
Also also, I analyzed Robinhood's ASO a few months ago. Check it out
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.
