This Week in Apps #43: Ending and Starting Big!
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.
Index
U.S. Mobile Download Index: App Store 117.94, Google Play 102.03
π Almost every game category has been up this month, marking a solid start for the year. The Health & Fitness grew, as expected for early January, by 18.43 points on the App Store and 7.6 points on Google Play, both higher than 2020.
Apps
1. Great Scott!
The Office left Netflix over the weekend and moved to NBC's new(ish) streaming app Peacock. The app, which offers a free-with-ads viewing model (as TV used to be), saw a massive increase in downloads following the move.
Our estimates show downloads peaked at 102K on Saturday and totaled 286K for the weekend across the App Store and Google Play.
π Read our analysis of Peacock
2. Just a sec
1 Second Everyday had a massive year opener, with single-day downloads peaking at an all-time high just shy of a million downloads, based on our estimates.
The app, which has been around for a few years, tends to get a spike every January 1st as people get excited about new year's resolutions. But this new Everest of downloads (988K) makes 2018 (68K downloads) and 2019 l(148K downloads) look like hills.
With so many downloads, 1 Second Everyday became the #1 app in the US App Store on January 1st, and remained there for two days.
3. China β€οΈ Tesla
Tesla's Model Y launched in China this weekend, aaaaand sold out immediately. The downloads followed.
Worldwide weekly downloads of the Tesla app more than doubled to 37K, according to our estimates, with most of the growth, 78% of new downloads, coming from China this week. Well done, Elon, who's now the richest man in the world π
(Elon, if you're reading this, please tweet this chart.)
Games
4. The Most Popular Games in December
We crunched the numbers and ranked the top games by downloads in December, the month for games.
Among Us! continues its massive takeover, adding more than 48M downloads to its lofty total. Other incumbents, Roblox, Garena Free Fire, Subway Surfers, and Gardenscapes are all in there too, continuing a year that's been good for non-hyper-casuals.
But, December also brought back the hyper-casuals, with two Voodoo titles and another from SayGames.
5. Twitching away
Twitch hit two new all-time highs in December with both monthly and weekly. Monthly revenue rose to an estimated $14.7 in the U.S. and weekly revenue for the last week of the year rose to $3.7M.
In January of 2020, monthly U.S. revenue was sitting at a tad over $4.8M, a third of what the game streamer ended the year with. Talk about a great run!
6. That's a lot of Minecoins!
There was news this week that Microsoft will be shutting down Minecraft Earth later this year. That's Microsoft's attempt to compete with PokΓ©mon Go.
Flagship Minecraft, however, is doing much better. In fact, Minecraft had its best day this Christmas, earning the most revenue in a single day. According to our estimates, Minecraft earned $400K of net revenue (meaning, after Apple's and Google's fees) on 12/25.
That's a 12% increase over 2019 and a 47% increase over 2018.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.
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.
