End of An Era for Zoom - Downloads Drop Below Pre-Pandemic Levels

Zoom, the app that made lockdowns slightly less depressing for many of us, has hit a new pace of downloads that wraps up three years of insanity.

Downloads are finally below where they started pre-pandemic.

And that's not a bad thing.

Everyone and their mother, aunt, and dog walker know what Zoom is at this point, an outcome the video conferencing app couldn't have predicted.

In downloads, that means more than a billion downloads since 2020. A billion. With a B.

At its peak, all the way back in Q2 of 2020, Zoom's mobile app was downloaded by more than 200M people worldwide. Three years later, Zoom saw just 38M downloads in Q1 of 2023.

Still a massive number, but nothing in comparison to its peak.

Now... that's not a bad thing.

Zoom was meant to be a business tool and that intent never really changed. It was hijacked to handle happy hours, trivia nights, and at-home raves, but at its core, it's a meeting tool.

The need for everything but the meeting tool is gone, and for a meeting tool, it's seeing the most downloads in its category. The next competitor on the list is Google Meet, and it made its way into less than half the devices Zoom did in March -- just 17M, according to our estimates.

Note - These numbers only reflect downloads of the mobile app, which isn't the primary way to use Zoom professionally, but is a proxy for casual use.

To me, the drop in downloads marks the end of an era. It's still winning.