This Week in Apps #22 - Epic Goes to Battle, TikTok's SDK, Zoom, and more.
This Week in Apps is a short, no-fluff, round-up of interesting things that happened in the mobile industry. Here are our top highlights.
U.S. Mobile Download Index: App Store 86.78, Google Play 89.20
An epic battle!
Fortnite’s creator has decided to play fast and loose with Apple and Google by grossly (and obviously) going against their terms and offering direct payments in the game.
As a result, Fortnite has been removed from the App Store and Google Play. In addition to disappointing hundreds of thousands of fans, it'll also cost Epic. According to our app intelligence, Epic will lose $25,000 for every hour the game isn't available in the U.S. App Store. Add that up, and we're looking at $4.5 million per week.
Is Epic boisterous, or did they set up a clever trap for Apple and Google, who are both being investigated for anti-competitive practices?
TikTok, but for developers
A lot has been said about TikTok in recent weeks, but one thing that’s gone fairly unnoticed is TikTok’s SDK for developers. The SDK, which was introduced last year, makes it easy to share content from any app directly to TikTok.
According to our SDK intelligence, TikTok’s SDK is installed in more than 1,600 iOS and Android apps, including games and photo/video editors that were downloaded by more than 311 million users in the last month alone, and not including TikTok's downloads.
TikTok's reach is much wider than most think.
Back to school
The school year is starting here in the U.S., and although there’s great debate over in-person attendance, it’s safe to say technology will be a big part of this back to school.
The Mobile Download Index confirms this with an increase of more than 112% since the beginning of July.
Social undistancing
Dating apps have had an interesting time over the last few months, dipping and rising during lockdown. Last weekend, Hinge saw lots of the latter hitting an all-time high for single-day revenue in the U.S. App Store.
According to our estimates, Hinge brought in $113,000 last Saturday. That’s a new record, which breaks the previous record set the weekend prior, which broke the record set just two weeks before.
While Hinge’s revenue is no match for industry-standard Tinder, its revenue growth has been very healthy.
Still zooooooooom
Downloads of lockdown winner Zoom, who’s seen downloads grow by more than 12,000% to top the charts across all countries, have been coming down since its March/April peak, and have now stabilized.
Although the new daily average sits at just about half of peak downloads, we estimate the stable average to be roughly 1.3 million downloads per day, across the App Store and Google Play.
That’s 47x higher than downloads in January.
That's it for this week. Get these insights by email by subscribing to the newsletter.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
