This is What Going Viral Looks Like - The Numbers Behind FaceApp

FaceApp has been in the news a lot this week. The seemingly magical AI face morphing app went viral earlier this week, resulting in a meteoric rise in Top App charts.

Let's take a look at the numbers behind FaceApp.

App Store Ranks

Although FaceApp has been around for over two years, its meteoric rise in Top App charts started just 5 days ago and happened almost overnight. Here's what going viral looks like on the App Store.

The app has maintained a fairly stable rank in its category for quite some time now, and even made it to the top of the charts once before -- back in April of 2017, but that only lasted two days. In the last week it climbed to the top position on both the App Store and Google Play and doesn't seem to be moving.

Downloads

What does going viral mean for downloads? Let's look at our App Intelligence:

Before going viral FaceApp averaged around 4.8K downloads per day across both the iOS App Store and Google Play in the US. After going viral, downloads grew by a multiple of more than 40 to 195K per day.

Apple vs. Google

What's also obvious from the chart above is that although the app averaged a similar number of downloads on the iOS App Store and Google Play before going viral, it's the iOS App Store that's fueling much of this growth.

In the 25 days before going viral, we estimate FaceApp for iOS had 68K downloads in the US. In the last 5 days, we estimate the total to be 854K. And, that's a comparison of 25 days to just 5 days.

On Google Play the numbers are much lower. In the 25 days prior to the app going viral, FaceApp totaled 54K downloads in the US. After going viral, the 5-day total increased to just 119K, roughly double.

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