Driving for Uber (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) has become a real job. Not that this is new in any way, but as a result of covid, the number of new drivers has grown at a crazy rate.
I looked at downloads of the Uber and Lyft driver apps in the US as a proxy for demand before, during, and after lockdowns and the numbers tell a very interesting story.
Can you guess how many new drivers Uber and Lyft added in January of 2020 without looking at the chart? 772K, according to our estimates.
Uber saw the lion share of new drivers with roughly 70% of the downloads.
In April, when everything locked down, downloads dropped 61% to 298K! But the drought didn't last long.
Uber and Lyft kicked off 2021 with 425K new downloads in January and peaked with 838K downloads in December, according to our estimates. Yes, almost a million new drivers joined in a single month - and that's only in the US.
Fast forward to July and the pair did it - 1.1M new downloads, according to our estimates. Downloads sloped down after the summer ended, but for Uber, downloads are still at all-time highs.
I did say Uber because Lyft isn't sharing the success.
While downloads of Uber Driver are up 211% since April 2020 and 195% for Lyft, when compared to January, Uber is still up 32% while Lyft's are down 11%.
And in more absolute terms, our App Intelligence shows Uber Driver saw 23.5M new downloads in the US since April of 2020 while Lyft added 6.7M as the gap between the two also rose giving Uber the clear upper hand.
It'll be interesting to see what sort of incentives Lyft will offer new drivers to get them back from Uber. Right now it seems like they're going in the opposite direction.
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