Uber and Lyft May Have Outgrown the US, But Not Waymo!
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Replacing Humans?. Check out the full article for more insights.
I recently visited San Francisco (for GDC), and it was hard not to see the swarm of Waymos driving around, picking up and dropping off drivers, all without a person in the driver's seat.
Driverless cars aren't new, but their popularity has been on the rise in the last few months. According to Appfigures Intelligence, downloads of Waymo One - the app needed to ride in one of these futuristic vehicles - rose 201% in the US since the beginning of 2024.
Are Uber and Lyft seeing the same explosion in demand?
Not really...
But let's start with Waymo One. According to our estimates, Waymo One's downloads saw their best month ever, adding 245K new users from the App Store and Google Play in February. That's up from 81K downloads back in January of 2024.
March isn't over yet but downloads are already higher, and keep in mind, Waymo is only available in a small handful of cities, making this growth significant.
Demand will continue to grow as Waymo expands to more cities and as more competitors enter the driverless ride market (like Tesla's Robotaxi in a few months).
Shifting gears to the human side of rides, I looked at Uber and Lyft's downloads in the US as a proxy for demand, and the numbers were flipped! Compared to the beginning of 2024, Lyft's downloads in the US are down 12% while Uber's are down a whopping 25%.
Lyft started 2024 with 993K estimated downloads in January and ended February of 2025 with 870K estimated downloads. Uber's situation is both better and worse at the same time.
Uber ended February of 2025 with 1.1M downloads from the US, according to our App Intelligence, but started 2024 with 1.4M.
Waymo isn't eating the competition's lunch right now, but it's certainly gaining momentum. Some do it for the novelty, others for the convenience, but it's just a matter of time before driverless cars pose a real competition to real drivers.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
