Back to School & Back to Normal

Ariel Ariel
8/26/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #128 - Instagram Wants to Be Real.... Check out the full article for more insights.


There's an app a lot of schools here in the US use to communicate with students called Remind. Every year around back-to-school time, Remind's downloads shoot up and it takes to the top of the App Store.

It's a cycle I've been seeing every year for many years.

It sloped down during covid, though, as schools became virtual and communication moved to Zoom and other such tools. But I was pleasantly surprised to see Remind hitting the top charts again this week, and even happier to see how many downloads it's getting right now.

Remind School app download estimates

Remind held on to the #2 spot in the US App Store for several days over the last two weeks thanks to more than two million new downloads, according to our estimates. Roughly 80% of those downloads came from the App Store, with the rest from Google Play.

What I found more interesting, however, was the trend over the last few years. When I zoomed out our App Intelligence dashboard all the way back to 2017, I noticed that this year's spike is significantly larger than the last few years.

When we look at the peak for each year we can clearly see the impact of covid and lockdowns, which cut Remind's downloads in half.

But that's all behind us because 2022 is on par with 2019, pre-covid.

Just the peaks:

  • 2017: 758K
  • 2018: 955K
  • 2019: 916K
  • 2020: 546K (Just the summer peak)
  • 2021: 454K
  • 2022: 900K

Covid isn't completely gone and probably won't be for a while, but some things, like going back to school, are putting it behind them, much like many of the other IRL apps I've looked at in the last few months.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #covid

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