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 117.94, Google Play 102.03
📈 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.
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.
👉 Read our analysis of Peacock
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.
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 👏
(Elon, if you're reading this, please tweet this chart.)
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.
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!
There was news this week that Microsoft will be shutting down Minecraft Earth later this year. That's Microsoft's attempt to compete with Pokémon 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.
#203 - Short drama apps are the latest trend in streaming, Disney+ is in trouble, the most downloaded and highest earning games, and more!
#202 - The Vision App Store has stalled, Facebook's milestone, ChatGPT and X end big months, and more.