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 84.34, Google Play 84.52
📈 The index is down this week for both stores, but it's Apple's that took a serious hit of 18 points. A sharp decrease in downloads of Productivity apps challenged double-digit increases in the Shopping and Music categories. Tis' the season to be less productive...
We crunched the numbers and ranked the top apps for November by downloads in the App Store and Google Play.
The results shouldn't surprise you with incumbents TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram in control of the App Store. WhatsApp, Telegram, and TikTok dominated Google Play globally.
Among Us, Roblox, Subway Surfers, and a few hyper-casual titles continued to be the most downloaded games globally.
Who's the next Among Us?
👉 The Most Downloaded Apps and Games in November 2020
Slack's changing hands. The chat app many of us use every day is going to a new suitor—Enterprise giant Salesforce.
Although Slack has become a household name in many companies, app downloads have been pretty flat in the last few years. So far in 2020, Slack added 6.7M downloads, up from 5.7M in the same period of 2019. However, this new demand was mainly generated by the move to work from home in March, which gave Slack a short-term spike that wasn't sustained.
What do you think will happen to Slack?
Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, has drastically outpaced Slack in 2020. Our estimates show Teams added more than 156M new downloads across the App Store and Google Play globally, lead by a massive burst in March.
Shopify's package tracker, Shop, had its biggest day of downloads this week as shoppers wait for their Black Friday hauls. Adobe and Amazon both confirmed last week was the biggest Black Friday for online/mobile sales, which fits the trend of 2020.
Based on our app intelligence, Shop netted 149.6K downloads on Black Friday (11/27), a new all-time high for the app. That record was broken just four days later, on Tuesday, with a new record high of 151.7K downloads.
Downloads of Hulu hit a new high for the year last weekend. The streaming service recorded more than 250K new downloads during Saturday and Sunday, record-breaking days with 126K and 125K downloads, respectively.
These back-to-back record-breakers come in just one day after their last record-breaker, which was last Thursday.
Side note: I really like Hulu's redesigned Apple TV app, where there are real genres.
In the last two weeks, the NBA's mobile app brought in more than $750,000 of gross revenue in the U.S. from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. The majority of revenue, a little under 80%, came from the iOS app.
2020 has been a very interesting year for sports, and the NBA's renewed push has been nothing but positive.
#228 - Gemini hasn't caught up to ChatGPT, Disney+ and Hulu see massive churn, X wins Black Friday, and our monthly ranking of highest-earning and most downloaded apps in November.
#227 - Netflix won the big fight, TikTok drives massive downloads for one game, games race to a billion, Bluesky overtakes X, and the upcoming mobile browser shakeup.