This Week in Apps #42: Amazon Beats Google, Wonder Woman Beats Mulan, 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 111.87, Google Play 95.65

📈 End of the year downloads have pushed the index up across the board, with Apple inching ahead of Google but both grew nicely. Games, Entertainment, and Lifestyle saw the most growth, but it's Health & Fitness you have to watch in January.

Wonder Woman was released last week in an experiment that's likely to change how movies are released in years to come. The long-awaited title went to theatres and HBO Max at the same time.

Downloads for HBO Max, which rebranded earlier this year, went through the roof, beating all direct-to-streaming releases from Disney+, based on our intelligence.

With a little bit of math, I worked out that HBO Max added roughly 136,000 new paying subscribers during the holiday weekend.

Read the full analysis

Did you ever think Twitter but with voice would be a great idea? Probably not, but some did and managed to get enough funding to get it off the ground.

Clubhouse is still in private beta and is only available for iOS, but managed to sneak into the top chart in the US.

Downloads rose to 67K on Tuesday (12/29), pushing total downloads to nearly 1M since its release, based on our intelligence.

That's a new all-time high for the invite-only service, and quite a few beta testers. Imagine having to manage that beta...

Twitter, but for voice, isn't a new idea. I heard a pitch for a similar service a couple of years ago and thought, like most others, that it's not the kind of idea that'll take off. Seems some investors have changed their mind since.

But (probably) not the Epic you’re thinking about.

Downloads of MyChart, a health app used by hospitals to give patients access to their information, and communicate with them, hit a new all-time high with 309K estimated downloads for the week last week.

Since C19, downloads of MyChart, which is developed by a company called Epic, have nearly quadrupled from what they were in 2019.

Health-related apps are a category to keep an eye on as part of the new normal.

There's a new chat app that's built for a single purpose: Among Us!

The now-ubiquitous game, which clinched #3 in our most downloaded games of 2020 list, gave Discord a huge boost in downloads. Now, AmongChat is trying to ride that same wave.

Downloads of AmongChat rose to an estimated 43K this Wednesday, in a trend that's strictly up-and-to-the-right. This is more than 10x the downloads the app saw earlier in the month. Notably, the majority of downloads come from Android devices, which outpaced iDevices 3 to 1.

Amazon's line of things you can speak into is a pretty standard holiday gift, and since its app only serves one purpose, we can use its downloads as a proxy for sales. Based on our estimates, downloads of Amazon Alexa grew to over 550K on Christmas day and 524K the day after. That's more than a million new Echos playing music and setting timers.

Google Home, which on average is downloaded more than Alexa, also saw downloads increase. Not as much as Amazon, though. Our estimates show 387K downloads on Christmas day and 404K the day after, across the App Store and Google Play Globally.