Trump is Driving Downloads Again, But Not to the App You'd Expect
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #129 - Twitter's Finally Growing (its Revenue). Check out the full article for more insights.
Ex-president Donald Trump has commanded the news lately. I don't want to get into the politics of it, but I expected such attention on him would lead to more downloads of his social network app Truth Social.
Truth Social rolled out earlier this year and had a very successful first week in the App Store, and I'm solely basing this statement on downloads. But after the first wave of excitement, the app disappeared from the top charts and downloads faded away quickly.
But while Truth wasn't getting attention, another app was – Rumble.
Rumble is downloaded around 7,000 times a day on average, according to our estimates. It had a few days where downloads tripled and even quadrupled for a day or so, but only a small handful around the 2020 elections.
Last week, downloads began to grow, and within a few days hit an all-time high.
Downloads started growing last Tuesday, when the app crossed 10,000 daily downloads. They continued to grow into the weekend and hit 215,000 on Saturday and a similar amount on Sunday.
They were down by the end of the weekend but are still about 8x higher than a normal day.
According to our App Intelligence, in the period between last Tuesday and this Tuesday, Rumble added 780,000 new downloads from the App Store and Google Play, though mainly from the App Store.
What's also worth noting is that not all downloads came from the US, which is what I had guessed would be the case. Roughly half of the downloads, across both the App Store and Google Play, came from the US. The rest came from all over the world, led by all English-speaking countries.
At the same time, Truth Social was downloaded just 41 thousand times on the App Store and non on Google Play, because there's no Android version.
Having never used Rumble I wonder if this kind of popularity will earn it the bullseye that ended Parler...
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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.
