This Week in Apps - Is That Still a Trend?
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. Revenue Index (vs. 30 days ago)
Insights
1. It Wasn't Just a Fad! Short Drama Apps Rallied in 2024
A new kind of app emerged last year and became very popular almost overnight, and while I expected its popularity to drop, it didn't! Competitors joined very quickly, and a little over a year in, the leader of the pack has seen monthly net revenue balloon to more than $24M, according to Appfigures eatimates. Net means after store fees.
The kind of app, in case you haven't guessed yet, is short drama streaming - which evolved into short TV - and the leader is ReelShort, which I first wrote about back in November of last year.
That was about a year after it was officially released, and at that time ReelShort had brought in a total of $22M since its release. Now it makes that in a month!
ReelShort's success attracted quite a few competitors. By April of this year, there were enough competitors to fill up a whole leaderboard, which ReelShort led.
I must admit, even in April, I expected this trend to disappear. Why? Because Quibi, the OG short TV app that launched to much fanfare back in 2020 failed almost instantly. But not this group.
Fast forward to right now - ReelShort is ranked 26th in the US App Store's Top Grossing chart. The next competitor, Dramabox, ranks 60th, while another competitor, GooDshort, ranks 77th.
That means there's money, a lot of money, in short drama apps.
How much money?
I used Explorer to find short drama apps and found 81 on the App Store and 61 on Google Play. Together, those apps earned $80M of net revenue in the last month, according to our estimates. That's after store fees.
ReelShort was the leader followed by ShortMax and Good Short. We estimate that 78 of the 142 total apps earned at least $10K of net revenue. 42 earned more than 100K of net revenue, and 13 earned at least a million. In a single month.
And here's what's even more interesting, and likely the reason why they are successful and that we keep seeing new competitors - we estimate that the revenue per download, on average, is $19. That means that for every download these apps get they keep $19. That's wildly higher than the industry average and means they can spend on user acquisition.
Let's see if this trends continues into next year.
2. Home Automation Went Open Source in 2024 - A BIG Year for Home Assistant
Home Assistant is a home automation platform that's competing with the likes of SmartThings, Google Home, and even Apple. It's differentiator is that unlike the rest, Home Assistant is open source and doesn't really feel open source - apparently you can have your cake and eat it too (somehow).
I've been tinkering with home automation for a long time and love that it's one of the most serious projects I've used - enough that it doesn't feel like it's open source.
And I'm not the only one.
Looking at downloads of the Home Assistant app, which isn't required to set it up but is most likely what every user uses to control their Home Assistant, all the effort to make Home Assistant thrive paid off in 2024.
Our estimates show that 2024 has been a record year for Home Assistant with downloads growing 40% year over year to 1.4M.
Google Play brought in the majority of downloads, 72% of the total, where Germany was the country with the most downloads. That was also the case on the App Store. Together, Germany was responsibe for 21% of all downloads in 2024. However, our App Intelligence is showing downloads in all 100+ countries we provide estimates for.
Although the US wasn't Home Assistant's biggest country, it came in second with 12% of the total. And while you might think that's not much, it's important to note that last year the US's share wasn't even big enough to get into the top 10. That's a big milestone for the open-source project.
Big but still small...
Home Assistant's growth is impressive but the competition is a bit bigger. Our estimates show that Google Home and Alexa, the most popular solutions, saw 32M and 29M downloads, respectively. But the two are on a downward trend, losing roughly 30% of downloads year over year.
SmartThings, the other popular name in home automation, saw 16M new downloads in 2024. Unlike the bigger competitors, SmartThings' downloads are up 15% year over year. So it's not that users don't want home automation but rather that they're not using Google and Amazon as much.
3. TikTok's Last Hurrah? Lemon8 is Finally Getting Traction
It's tik tok time for TikTok. The platform has less than a month to sell its US operation to a local company or get banned. I doubt this drama will end with a sale or a bank by January 19th as the new law requires, but that's not stopping TikTok owner ByteDance from pushing its other properties.
Just in case?
Lemon8 is a ByeDance platform that's somewhere between Instagram and Pinterest focused on lifestyle using both photos and videos with a discovery feed similar to TikTok's and built-in shopping.
Although Lemon8 was launched alll the way back in 2020, it didn't start getting attention until 2022 where daily downloads jumped from under 10K to about 40K. That's when ByeDance started paying influencers to post on the platform actively.
Downloads showed a slight upward trend since, but overall remained fairly consistent. Our App Intelligence shows Lemon8 ending 2021 with 1.8M downloads, 2022 with 11M downloads, and 2023 with 17M downloads.
Let's zoom in on the US, Lemon8's biggest market. This year, Lemon8 has been averaging 225K downloads per week in the US. That's quite a few downloads for an app that requires a separate login even though it's owned by TikTok.
One little feature
Well, ByteDance changed that and that lifted Lemon8 to the top of the US App Store, where it's been for several weeks. It even became the #1 app in the US for a few days.
That little feature, letting users log in with their TikTok accounts, pushed downloads to their highest. Our App Intelligence shows weekly downloads rose to 426K, then 5558K, and then a whopping 805K in the last three weeks. This is by far Lemon8's best few days of downloads.
Lemon8 added ?? downloads since the feature was rolled out in November.
Why is this important?
ByteDance has a lot of power it's not really using with its other apps. Or at least wasn't until recently. But when it does, downloads skyrocket and so does revenue. We saw that happen with CapCut, ByteDance's video editor Capcut.
If TikTok is indeed about to get banned Lemon8 is positioned to keep ByteDance's space in the social space.
Grow Smarter, with Data.
Affordable tools for ASO, Competitive Intelligence, and Analytics.
4. It's Official, the King is Back! Here are the Most Downloaded Games in The World
We crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded games in the world in November. Lots of games moved in November, which is what I like to see.
The king made its way back home to the top position - that's Subway Surfers, which has been the most downloaded game in our ranking for a very long time. It was dethroned in October by a game that went viral on TikTok, but that's all done now. Subway surfers added 21M fresh downloads in November, up a few millions from October. That's nice.
Mini games, the one that went viral on TikTok last month, came in second in November with 20M new downloads from the App Store and Google Play - though mostly from Google Play. That's the same number of downloads the game got in October, which is impressive considering how it got popular.
Block Blast, Tip Tao Challenge, and Pokemon TCG Pocket round out the top five for November. The first two managed to get a higher rank vs. October.
Pokemon TCG is a new title from the Pokemon Company that came out at the very end of October. The title managed to score 14M downloads and $126M of net revenue (after store fees) in November, according to our estimates. Its net revenue grew to $187M as of the end of December.
Our App Intelligence shows that together, the top 10 most downloaded games in the world brought in 145M new downloads in November. Just about the same as October. Christmas is upon us and if we compare this November to last November we can expect downloads to rise at least 16%.
5. Pokemon TCG Almost Won November. These are the Highest Earning Games in The World
Pokemon TCG was a big winner in terms of downloads, ranking 5th in our chart. But it wasn't just downloads.
We ranked the highest-earning games in November and guess what - Poekmon TCG is up there too. Really up there.
Not that high though. Honor of Kings was the highest-earning game in the world in November. According to our App Intelligence, the China-only title, earned $120M of net revenue in November. A decent chunk lower than October, but the trend is very similar to last year so I don't find it surprising.
Pokemon TCG Pocket came in second with $113M of net revenue, that's what the Pokemon Company gets to keep after store fees, according to our estimates. It's worth noting that the title ranked second in the App Store and third in Google Play.
I expect nothing less from the Pokemon IP, but I'm not sure if it'll be able to hold on to its rank in December.
Royal Match, Whiteout Survival, and Monopoly Go round out the top five highest earning games in November. Each earned a bit less than October, but that's pretty much on trend.
Together, the top 10 highest earners brought in $849M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play in November, according to our estimates. A bit less than October and a step away from the $1B the top 10 have been racing towards, but I suspect that will change in December.
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.
