In-store shopping has taken a significant hit as most of the world went into lockdown about a month ago. Most people no longer shop in stores and those who do shop for others. Other than groceries, most purchasing has moved online.
The abrupt shift in shopping behavior has caused demand for "Arrive," a package tracker built by Shopify, to soar.
Since the beginning of March, downloads of the app in the US have doubled from just under 40,000 downloads per day across the App Store and Google Play in early March to more than 80,000 downloads per day on April 10th. This 100% increase is the largest the app has ever seen, exceeding the holiday rush during Christmas of 2019, where the app peaked at 78,000 downloads for just one day.
Looking at Arrive's keywords, it's very apparent that organic optimization is a strong driver of new downloads as the app is a top result for several high-popularity keywords. Here's a selection of the app's top keywords in the App Store:
Arrive's substantial downloads is putting the app at the top of search results for relevant and popular keywords such as "tracking" and "package tracker", where the app is the #1 search result in the US App Store, as well as keywords like "track orders" and even "Amazon orders".
In addition, through its keyword list in App Store Connect, Arrive is in the top 5 search results for branded searches of UPS, FedEx, DHL, and others, giving it a lot of free exposure.
Digging under the hood, we've looked to see what technologies the Arrive is using and what sort of tracking the app does. In short, Swift, React Native, and no egregious trackers. That's pretty good, but considering the app is made by reputable Shopify, this is no surprise.
Here are the SDKs and APIs used by the iOS and Android version of Arrive:
Arrive seems to be using a pretty simple set of SDKs and APIs. Swift and React Native for development, LocationKit, and Mapbox for mapping, the now ubiquitous Firebase for tracking, likely a replacement for the deprecated Fabric and Crashlytics, and Branch for attribution.
While several of those SDKs are probably collecting usage data, namely Firebase and Branch, those are big enough names, so we expect that sort of tracking to be for product development and nothing else.
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