Chrome is the Most Downloaded 3rd Party Browser on iOS. Are Apple Search Ads Behind the Downloads?
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I've been seeing a lot of ads on the App Store for Google Chrome. The downloads show Chrome is the most downloaded not-Safari browser on the App Store, but how far ahead is it, and is its investment into visibility on the App Store different than that of the competition?
Very, and yes.
I summed up the downloads for the top browsers on the App Store in 2024, which include the browser that got me into web development many years ago, and the results are veeery skewed.
Chrome was the most downloaded 3rd party browser in the App Store in 2024. It got a whopping 71M new downloads globally, led by the US, China, India, and Brazil. With the exception of China, the other three are usually big downloaders on Google Play.
In second place we have Microsoft Edge. Yes, Microsoft. I didn't really expect that until I saw its ASA campaign. Edge got 18M downloads in 2024 from the App Store, according to our estimates.
Opera, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo each got between 5M and 7M downloads, and together totaled 26M downloads in 2024. Barely beating Edge and faaaar away behind the race when compared to Chrome. Seeing their ASA campaigns, I'm not surprised.
When we add them all up, Chrome's share comes out to 62%. Wow!
It should come as no surprise that Google is the biggest spender on Apple Search Ads, and not by a little.
Just like the downloads, Edge gets close while the rest are barely even noticeable, but Google is by far the biggest spender.
I used our Apple Search Ads Intelligence, which lets me see all of the keywords any app is using in their Apple Search Ads campaigns, to compare the top browsers. By the way, you can do that too.
Our data show that Chrome was seen across 8.7K keywords in the US. I looked through the list and it's very interesting. Google is investing heavily in brand protection by being the top bidder on every keyword that vaguely resembles "chrome" including misspelled words, words with missing letters, and words that sound somewhat similar.
Some in the UA community believe this is a must for any brand. I don't think so myself, but regardless, it's very expensive.
The campaigns also stretch to generic popular keywords like "tiktok", "youtube", and "canva", likely using ASA's search match. Here, Google isn't the leader but just another app that shows up sometimes, conserving some budget.
Edge comes in second, again, with a campaign that's less than half the size, just 3.1K keywords. I should reserve "just" for the other browsers because it looks like they're barely trying. Opera's campaign has a little more than 700 keywords while Firefox's - the browser that started it all for me - is being seen in just about 100 keywords.
Are Opera, Mozilla, and others letting Chrome win on purpose? By extension, are you letting your competitors outpace you with their ASA campaigns? Ads are expensive, sure, but there are a variety of ways to optimize them to get more bang for your buck using data.
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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.
