Bluesky Hit 20M Users and Overtook X in App Downloads for the First Time

Bluesky, the other X, has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks because it started getting popular on and after Election Day.

How popular? Enough to make it the top app in the US (and other countries), help it cross 20M users, and start getting more daily downloads than rival X - a lot more.

A few weeks ago I said that Bluesky has an Elon problem. Bluesky doesn't seem to agree, so let's have a look at app downloads an see if that's still the case.

Our App Intelligence shows that Bluesky was downloaded a smidge over 16M times since it was released to the App Store and Google Play back in 2023. But... Looking at the trend, there's a clear change this year.

You might be thinking that's the result of Bluesky opening up to the public back in February, but the big change actually came in late August. In fact, the majority of Blueky's downloads, over 11M (~70%) came in between the end of August and the end of November.

Before elections week, Blueky's daily downloads were fairly low but peaked when something happened with X, but that's changed since the elections.

Looking at Bluesky's downloads trend show they've shifted up drastically, from around 2,000 per day before the summer to more than 400,000 every day in the last few weeks - and that's a conservative estimate. I don't think you need me to turn that into percent, but if you do, that's roughly a 19,900% increase.

X saw about 275K downloads per day on average before the elections and rose a bit to a little over 300K over the last few weeks, but that's going back to normal as of this weekend. Bluesky's downloads are dropping as well, going from a peak of 490K down to 340K on Saturday. Still vastly different than the before days.

Does Bluesky still have an Elon problem?

Yes. And I don't mean to take sides here (I'm on both) but rather think about both as businesses.

Bluesky's rise, even this latest wave, is a direct result of Elon being political. Not an algorithm change, not feature improvements, and not a clever evolution of the platform - the two are still fairly identical in the bits and bytes. Oh, and Bluesky's main difference, that it's distributed, isn't a feature most new users even understand, so I wouldn't call it a mass market differentiator.

It's possible that with enough of these waves of signups Bluesky will eventually get enough momentum to grow on its own, but what happens if people forget about politics?