Last week I looked at how revenge travel is sky-rocketing and how well we can see it translate into downloads. I looked at airlines, car rentals, and travel booking apps. And there were a lot of downloads.
Well, there's one "little" category I didn't touch on that's also seeing downloads exploding, and that's the category pretty much owned by Google, which is driving directions apps. And by that, I mean Google Maps and Waze.
Combined weekly downloads of Google Maps and Waze, both owned by Google, rose by 92% since January. In absolute terms, that translates into 4.8 million downloads last week, according to our estimates, which happens to be the second-highest week of downloads this year.
I'm not sure why this trend is called revenge travel, but what I am sure is that this is a great time for competitors to step up their mobile game and ride this wave instead of letting Google grow its user base even more.
Black Friday felt different this year. Not bad, with US downloads in the Shopping category rising 10 in November vs. las...
After years of decline, 2025 marks a dramatic reversal: the App Store is experiencing its biggest wave of new app releas...