The Numbers Behind Kalshi's and Polymarket's Mobile Surge

Election day has come and past and to say this time around was aaaaaaall different would be an understatement. Something I found interesting was the use of betting markets as a proxy for who could win, even as they countered what traditional polling suggested.

Now that we know the results we know the bets were pretty accurate.

Polymarket and Kalshi are those platforms with the former dominating much of the news for the last month or so while the latter got more popular on the App Store.

Kalshi is the "oldest" of the pair. Polymarket's mobile app is very young, released just a couple of months ago back in September, as the platform was getting more publicity.

According to our App Intelligence, Kalshi wasn't very popular for much of its time on the App Store and Google Play, getting a total of 195K downloads between when it launched and the end of September. But that's when things really turned around and also when Polymarket launched.

We estimate that since the beginning of October, the pair has made its way into 1.3M devices through the App Store and Google Play.

Kalshi was responsible for the majority of the downloads, roughly 865K, according to our estimates, which came through the App Store at a rate of roughly one to ten vs Google Play. Polymarket's downloads were a bit lower at 365K, also led by the App Store but with a smaller multiplier.

The new demand surged both to the top of the App Store yesterday, election day, where we estimate the two saw nearly 250K downloads in a single day!

The pair is still ranked 1st and second in the US App Store but with the elections behind us I'm sure the surge will subside. But... both offer lots of other things to bet on, so they could maintain some traction. So although it wasn't the mobile app that made either popular, it's the mobile apps that could maintain their success.