Scooter rental apps are one of my favorite topics to look at during the summer. Downloads peak in August, and over the last few years have been growing consistently year over year after taking a slight hit in the early days of the pandemic.
To get a better idea of where the trend is heading, I rounded up the most popular scooter rental apps, which include Bird, Lime, Spin, and Scoot, and the downloads surprised me.
According to our estimates, the group grew consistently year over year since 2020. Just looking at downloads during the month of June, the group's downloads grew from 1.8M in 2020 to 2.6M in 2022. That's 56% over two years.
Lime is the most popular of the bunch. It contributed more than half of all downloads, 1.4M in June of 2022, to be specific, according to our estimates. Bird was right below it with 998K downloads.
When looking at downloads for 2023 June looks... incomplete. But it isn't.
According to our App Intelligence, which is where all of the data in this series comes from, Lime saw 1.2M new downloads in June of 2023. Bird was, again, right below it with 557K downloads. Yes, about half of 2022!
Scoot and Spin, which see far fewer downloads, also dropped 20%+ in 2023.
Together, the group's downloads were down to 2M in June of 2023, according to our estimates. That's a 23% decrease from last year, and the first drop since the pandemic started.
Electric scooters are great, and I speak from experience, but rentals always felt like a half-baked idea. Between the clutter scooters returned to random spots create and the safety challenges, many big cities were forced to ban them altogether, and that really hurt adoption.
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