When I analyzed the top business apps for our monthly report, I noticed Microsoft Teams was ranking pretty high. 4th overall, actually. But you know who's not there? The app I use daily to communicate. Slack.
So, where's Slack these days? Let's look at some numbers.
Look at that trend...
The easy answer here is that for Slack, it's "business as usual" on mobile. For Microsoft Teams, the only way to describe it is "massive growth". Teams and Slack are the most popular business chat tools, but there's another you hear about much more often these days, even though it isn't "technically" a business tool — Discord.
Side by side, we can see that Slack's downloads have remained fairly consistent over the last few years. Since 2019, downloads actually increased from a little under 600K/mo. to more than 800K in September, according to our estimates.
With no additional context, it'd be safe to say Slack's doing alright. But then we look at Teams, which we estimate to have added 13.6 million downloads in September, and Discord, which our estimates put at 9M. All of a sudden, Slack's 800K seems very small.
Teams, which has been around for a while but only really got pushed once lockdowns started, saw a meteoric rise in March and April of last year. Discord did as well. Both continued to ride high since. Slack didn't, really.
Slack's user base is huge, so it's not going anywhere. But, this trend provides an explanation for why we've been seeing more features coming to the product. I felt like they spent too much time selling out and not enough competing, and it definitely cost them.
Another reminder that competition isn't always bad for end-users. Now all we need is stable videos...
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