When Apple rolled out Apple invites, seemingly out of nowhere, a few months ago, everyone on the internet was ready for the entire invite app market to collapse. Or, as seasoned developers would call it: sherlocked.
It happened enough times before that it was expected. The warm reception Apple Invites got didn't help much.
We've got a few months of data now and it's time to see just how bad incumbents like Partiful, Evite, and other invite apps got sherlocked. Or, did they at all?
Before we look at the competitive landscape, we have to look at Apple Invites. Apple Invites had a very strong release, adding 1.6M new downloads in its first week on the App Store, according to our App Intelligence.
Downloads trended down fairly quickly, averaging 45K per day for most of February and continued to drop in March averaging 25K daily downloads for most of the month.
In total, our estimates show Apple invites had 3.3M downloads since its release.
Now that we have some context, let's take a look at the competition. For this, I rounded up the top invite apps - not including business tools which don't really compete here - and looked at the downloads since the release of Apple Invites compared to the same period last year.
I only half expected these results:
Just glancing at the comparison it's clear sherlocking didn't happen here. At all.
Every single invite app in the collection saw more downloads after Apple invites was released vs. last year, and it makes perfect sense. Apple showed people who didn't really know about invite apps that they existed, and Apple Invites being somewhat basic and only available on the App Store drove them to look for alternatives.
Evite's downloads rose 7%, Paperless Post's downloads rose by 10%, and Partiful, the app everyone mentioned in comparison to Apple Invites back in February, saw downloads rise 295%.
Punchbowl was the only competitor that didn't see any increase, but it's the smallest of the bunch.
So, what's going on here?
Apple's catering to a totally different audience!
The invitation market for apps wasn't very big before Apple got into it and instead of taking users away from existing apps, Apple really created awareness for a product that's new for many millions. That's how it managed to get millions of downloads while every other app saw increases as well.
This is also evident when looking at the age and gender of Apple Invites vs the group's leader, Partiful. While Partiful's audience skews more young and is balanced between the genders, Apple Invites is more popular with men in older age groups (35 and up).
Not every release from Apple is a sherlock.
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