Summer is a great time for some home improvement. Even I've already been to the Home Depot a few times, and I live in Manhattan. That's why I wasn't surprised when I saw that downloads of the Home Depot app and rival Lowes are up in June.
But... It wasn't just June. Downloads have been on the rise for most of 2022, and the numbers are bigger than in previous years.
According to our estimates, May was Home Depot's highest month of downloads this year and also ever. And that includes the spike that came during lockdowns back in 2020.
In numbers, we estimate that more than a million people downloaded Home Depot's app in May, up more than 100% vs. May of 2021. Coincidentally, Home Depot's last spike came in May of 2020 and resulted in 790 thousand downloads.
So far in 2022, our estimates show Home Depot making its way into 6 million iOS and Android devices. The same period in 2021 saw just 3 million new downloads.
Rival Lowes has also seen downloads go up in Q2, but not nearly as aggressively as the orange monster. Lowes had its best month of download in 2022 in May as well, adding roughly 540 thousand new users, according to our estimates. This comes close to the big spike it had in May of 2020 due to the lockdown, which was a bit higher.
I've talked about shopping moving to mobile a bunch in the last few episodes, and this is yet another fine example. But...
Unlike the real world, where customers can't be in two stores at the same time, it's very easy to look up an item in multiple apps, and it's not just about pricing. Experience has become an important part of the decision to buy, and frankly, not many shopping apps do it well right now. The Home Depot's included.
Except for Amazon, of course. Why can't they just copy it?
Fallout, a new TV show based on the popular game series with the same name, premiered on Amazon Prime earlier this month...
Newspapers went through a critical transformation over the last decade that saw physical newspapers go the way of the do...