Au Revoir Wish

Although this isn't the Black Friday edition, there's some news in the shopping world that's worth exploring.

Earlier this week, French regulators announced the country is asking Apple and Google to remove the Wish shopping app from their stores in France. The reason, as they explain, is that Wish makes it possible for sellers to cheat consumers by saying they're selling brand names but really sell knock-offs.

Sounds pretty bad, but... that's not Wish's biggest problem.

I was curious to see how big Wish is in France, so I turned to our App Intelligence to see how many new users it's getting every day in France. In the process, I saw an alarming trend in France that's also happening across the globe.

Downloads in France totaled 2 million so far in 2021, which may sound like a hefty number but compared to the same period last year, it's actually a drop of 44%. That's a big one!

As you can see in the chart above, this isn't new. Since the beginning of 2019, Wish has been losing traction at a pretty rapid rate in France across iOS and Android devices. And the trend is very similar globally.

If you recall, Wish overtook Amazon in downloads at one point last year...

I suspect France isn't the last country to regular shopping, and personally, I think it's a great move to protect consumers. I m also starting to see a trend in how governments approach mobile and the internet. That's going to be an interesting one to follow.

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