There has been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about things opening up. In the US, many states have already started settling into the new normal, and most others will soon.
This grand re-opening had an almost immediate impact on App Store downloads of Google Maps, which suffered a loss of more than half of daily downloads since the lockdown started.
We've been tracking new downloads of Google Maps as an indicator of more outside activity taking place. For the last three consecutive weeks, the app has seen an increase in download week-over-week
The first week of April was the last week of declining downloads for Google Maps on the App Store. After that, downloads have been increasing at a rate that's starting to look exponential. Starting at just around 692K downloads per week and going all the way up to 950K in the most recent full week. An increase of 37% in new downloads.
Looking at the Mobile Download Index, we can see things are starting to warm up in the travel category, which was hit the hardest by the global lockdowns.
China, who's ahead of the rest of the world, has seen downloads of travel apps grow in the last 90 days. The travel index is up 82% in the last 90 days. China is the only country where the category has a positive trend.
Nearby Hong Kong has also seen an increase in the last few weeks, but they're still down vs. 90 days ago. The US isn't growing, but has stabilized and is now starting to show signs of an upward trend. We expect this trend to continue as more states re-open.
This can be seen as a great sign of how quickly apps that rely on people being outside will recover. However, while the positive impact is immediate, full recovery will take a while.
Since the beginning of 2020, Google Maps has lost more than 60% of its downloads. The first week of 2020 saw 1.8M downloads while the weakest week, just four weeks ago, totaled 692K downloads. Even with the latest week's numbers going up to 950K, that's still half of what a week's worth of downloads was like in January.
There's no doubt things will recover in time, and with Summer being right around the corner, we expect to see this upward trend continue.
China is waging war on messaging apps. Not all, but the most popular ones. Late Thursday night, China asked Apple to re...
Success for a streaming app isn't a matter of luck but rather content (and looooots of marketing). That's why Max (HBO's...