I've been looking at apps in Russia a lot lately, but this week I want to bring your attention back to Ukraine, where a new(ish) app has taken control of the App Store and Google Play.
That app is no other than Elon Musk's Starlink!
Downloads of Starlink, which was activated in Ukraine earlier in the month after an exchange on Twitter between Ukraine's vice prime minister and Elon Musk, have been on the rise.
In case you're not familiar, Starlink is an internet provider that normally connects places with little infrastructure using a satellite network owned by SpaceX.
It rose slowly since it was enabled in Ukraine on 2/26, but on Monday, which happened to be Appfigures' birthday, it reached the top of the App Store in Ukraine to become the most downloaded app. It reached the #2 spot on Google Play at the same time, where it still is right now.
War makes estimating downloads a bit more challenging, for obvious reasons, but even so, we estimate that Starlink saw more than 100K downloads in Ukraine since it became available on February 26th.
Not every download is a device activation, still, it's a whole lot of people regaining access to the internet! We're something similar on the other side, where millions of Russians who are blocked from accessing the internet downloaded VPN apps to regain access.
With Google Play somewhat crippled in Russia at the moment, I can't even imagine how much work Apple is doing to keep things going normally.
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