Bluesky has positioned itself as the best alternative to X, making its first year out of invite-only beta very tumultuous. On mobile, the service has gone from just around a thousand daily downloads to peaking at nearly 500K daily downloads more than once.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, Bluesky saw more than 20M downloads from the App Store and Google Play since opening to the public last February.
In the last few weeks, however, Bluesky's downloads have dropped to the lowest they've been since the elections, and the trend is looking positive.
Why? Elon.
Bluesky has an "Elon problem" - the platform's popularity is tightly tied to Elon Musk's actions. When he said X might start charging everyone last year Bluesky saw its first major spike in downloads.
When Elon aligned with Trump, Bluesky saw another spike, and throughout the election cycle, Bluesky's downloads rose significantly and even beat X's for a hot second.
Need proof? Now that Elon is busy elsewhere and his focus isn't explicitly on running X, Bluesky's downloads have hit their lowest numbers since the election cycle started.
Bluesky's first substantial downloads spike came last August and drove Bluesky's downloads to as high as 420K/day. The reason? X was banned in Brazil temporarily.
The next spike brought 357K downloads in a single day and was a result of X changing the way user blocking works.
Then came the elections, driving downloads up for several weeks and peaking at 435K downloads followed by the inauguration, which didn't spike downloads as high but still gave Bluesky a substantial increase that lasted about a month.
I love the idea of competition because it ultimately benefits users, but I'm still waiting for Bluesky to break away from being "the other X" and to provide something different. That will end the "Elon problem", but until that happens, I see the current trend continuing.
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
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