What's one popular app you can blindly expect to top the download charts without hesitation? If you said Facebook, you'd be right. The app has been in the top 10 most downloaded apps in the US and many other countries for so long that you'd think it's superglued to that list somehow.
But this week, I was surprised to find a top 10 that doesn't include Facebook. Nor top 20, not even 30.
I thought our Top App lists were broken for a moment. They weren't. Facebook has dropped significantly over the last few days.
Our hourly category rank tracking is showing that in the US, the slide started last Tuesday. Facebook ranked 4th overall on Tuesday in the US App Store, the list that ranks both apps and games. By Wednesday, Facebook dropped to 9th place, and by Thursday, it had already left the top 10, sliding into 14th place.
It didn't stay there very long...
Fast forward to yesterday (Thursday) and Facebook's rank has dropped so much it is now sitting at #41 overall. 41!!!
What does that mean for downloads? If this is really a drop in demand and not a change in how the App Store ranks apps, our estimates show that the initial drop, last week, lost Facebook more than 60% of daily downloads in the App Store globally. In more absolute terms, we're estimating the drop to be more than 200,000 downloads a day.
That doesn't seem to be the case on Google Play, which could mean this is the App Store. Let's see if it rebounds.
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