This Week in Apps - Replacing Humans?

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.

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U.S. Revenue Index (vs. 30 days ago)

Insights

1. Uber and Lyft May Have Outgrown the US, But Not Waymo!

I recently visited San Francisco (for GDC), and it was hard not to see the swarm of Waymos driving around, picking up and dropping off drivers, all without a person in the driver's seat.

Driverless cars aren't new, but their popularity has been on the rise in the last few months. According to Appfigures Intelligence, downloads of Waymo One - the app needed to ride in one of these futuristic vehicles - rose 201% in the US since the beginning of 2024.

Are Uber and Lyft seeing the same explosion in demand?

Not really...

But let's start with Waymo One. According to our estimates, Waymo One's downloads saw their best month ever, adding 245K new users from the App Store and Google Play in February. That's up from 81K downloads back in January of 2024.

March isn't over yet but downloads are already higher, and keep in mind, Waymo is only available in a small handful of cities, making this growth significant.

Demand will continue to grow as Waymo expands to more cities and as more competitors enter the driverless ride market (like Tesla's Robotaxi in a few months).

Shifting gears to the human side of rides, I looked at Uber and Lyft's downloads in the US as a proxy for demand, and the numbers were flipped! Compared to the beginning of 2024, Lyft's downloads in the US are down 12% while Uber's are down a whopping 25%.

Lyft started 2024 with 993K estimated downloads in January and ended February of 2025 with 870K estimated downloads. Uber's situation is both better and worse at the same time.

Uber ended February of 2025 with 1.1M downloads from the US, according to our App Intelligence, but started 2024 with 1.4M.

Waymo isn't eating the competition's lunch right now, but it's certainly gaining momentum. Some do it for the novelty, others for the convenience, but it's just a matter of time before driverless cars pose a real competition to real drivers.

2. How T-Mobile Leaped TikTok, ChatGPT, and Other Popular Apps to Reach the Top of the App Store!

I actively watch the top charts, and for months, I've been seeing the pink icon of T-Mobile somewhere up top in the US. I initially thought it was a temporary spike, but that wasn't the case.

In fact, according to our store ranks, T-Mobile hovered in the top 10 overall, which includes both apps and games, for about three months on both the App Store and Google Play in the US.

Momentum started slowing down in recent weeks, but that reversed today (Wednesday) and T-Life is now #1 in the US App Store.

Ranks are interesting but downloads are actionable. Let's have a look at our App Intelligence and also talk about how T-Mobile managed to do this.

Most of you are probably asking "What's T-Life???". I had the exact same question.

T-Life is the "everything" app for T-Mobile's wireless phone service. Kind of. See, for a while T-Mobile had two apps, one for its services and another for its perks. The former was as popular as you'd expect from an app needed to operate a wireless account. The latter got more love because it gave away stuff for free.

Put this on hold because we'll get back to this. Let's talk about the download surge T-Life saw at the end of last year.

According to Appfigures Intelligence, T-Life's daily downloads started rising at the end of October, and by mid November, the app's daily average doubled from an estimated 15K downloads to more than 30K. It didn't stay there too long though.

We estimate that by December, the daily average rose to more than 65K where it stayed for several months.

In total, the surge gave T-Life over 9M new downloads from the App Store and Google Play where the App Store had a pretty consistent lead.

For context, it took T-Life 2 whole years to get a similar number of downloads before October (all of 2022 and 2023).

So, what happened?

T-Mobile combined its account management app with its free perks app. But that wasn't it entirely.

T-Life received account management features back in January of 2024, but T-Mobile's original account management app was still available for download. That changed in October, driving a lot of downloads which resulted in an increase in ranks and visibility. T-Mobile also pushed it very hard which didn't hurt, and the result was sustained high ranks and sustained 3x daily downloads.

Companies, even the seemingly boring ones, are starting to see the value in being visible on the App Store and Google Play and are doing what they can to get a lead. I expect to we'll be seeing more of that as the year marches on.

3. Color Block Jam Crosses $25M, Aims to Join the Successful Hybrid Casual Club

I spent all of last week at GDC so games are fresh on my mind and one of the trends I've been watching most closely is the evolution of hybrid casual games. Not hyper but hybrid casual games. Seemingly similar, but vastly different.

Hyper casual games, the simple kind that don't require more than a swipe or a tap and monetize with ads, have had a long and successful run, but took a major hit with the introduction of Apple Tracking Transparency.

Hybrid casual games tend to have more "game" to them which enables them to monetize with in-app purchases, and for quite a while now, titles like Subway Surfers and Candy Crush Saga have been at the top of our Highest-Earning Games charts.

Newcomer Color Block Jam wants to join the party.

Color Block Jam was released last summer by Rollic Games, which is owned by Zynga, which is owned by Take-Two Interactive. So, this is no indie game. Not-so-indie games usually enjoy a big ad budget which tend to skew performance - so I won't be looking at downloads but rather at what's more important for a hybrid casual game - revenue.

You can easily pay to get downloads but it's much harder to pay to get paid. It also sounds funny.

According to our App Intelligence, CBJ earned its first million in mid-January. The game hit the $5M milestone in early February, the $15M mark in early March and $25M before March was over. All of these numbers are before Apple and Google take their fees.

Mostly Apple though, because the majority of CBJ's revenue, 74% since release, came from the App Store. More specifically, the US App Store.

CBJ will end March with a little more than $15M in consumer spending, according to our estimates, which puts it fairly far from top performers (Candy Crush Saga grossed more than $100M last month), but its rapid revenue growth puts it on the right path.

I'm waiting to see an indie hybrid casual get to this scale. Will it happen in 2025?

4. Claude's Long Awaited Update is Here - Did it Move the Needle?

We're barely three months into 2025 and have already seen a barrage of AI innovations. From DeepSeek, Grok 3, and updates from ChatGPT to a handful of models and agents from Asia.

Aaaaaand, an update to Anthropic's Claude which I've been waiting for a while now!

Claude Sonnet 3.7 dropped at the end of February and I was hoping it'll come with the little improvements Claude's mobile app desperately needs to get more visibility on the App Store and Google Play.

That didn't exactly happen... but Claude still had a nice spike in revenue.

Claude's mobile revenue started rising right after Sonnet 3.7 was announced at the end of February and remained higher than the pre 3.7 average. Does that remind you of something? It reminds me of when ChatGPT rolled out gpt4o last year and saw a shift in revenue.

Claude isn't basking in as much glory, but the numbers are good.

According to Appfigures Intelligence, net revenue rose from a daily average of $50K to a peak of $85K where it stayed for a few days. The trend is in the not-so-good direction, but even with that, revenue is still a little higher than the pre 3.7 average.

Note - Claude's net revenue crossed $100K for one day, 2/28, but I didn't include that as a peak because February is a short month and subscription revenue that would have been charged after the 28th on longer months gets bundled into a single big day, and isn't necessarily indicative of demand.

I'm happy to see demand for Claude grow because it's a good model, especially for working with code. But when you put that in perspective, almost every other competitor makes more money with its app. Grok only started monetizing at the end of February and makes more consistently, and ChatGPT earns about 40x more.

That's both good and bad news for Anthropic, which raised $3.5B earlier this month. The good news is that the demand is there and the wallets are open, but the bad news is that the app just isn't working as is despite a massive paid ads campaign in the App Store.

Maybe Anthropic will use some of that investment money to improve its visibility in the App Store and on Google Play. The demand is definitely there.

5. The Audiobooks Market Recovered and Rallied Led by Audible

I've been fascinated by the audiobook market on mobile for a few years now having followed the rise of Audible as the leader.

I should probably add the rise is "meteoric" because according to Appfigures estimates, Audible's monthly app revenue grew more than 12,000% between the beginning of 2020 and this February!

But it wasn't a simple up-and-to-the-right...

Audible enjoyed a very growth-full period between 2020 and 2022. Our App Intelligence shows net revenue, what Audible's parent Amazon gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees, rose from a few hundreds of thousands in January of 2020 to $30M in December of 2022.

That's a lot of growth!

But increased competition combined with the end of lockdowns and what felt like a drop in promoted ads by Audible led to a year that started high and ended low. Lower than where 2022 ended.

In 2024 Audible made changes to its subscription tiers, brought on more exclusives, and optimized its marketing. Our App Intelligence shows that the concoction worked!

Although Audible's revenue didn't start out high, just $35M net vs $40M net (after fees) the year before, revenue really rallied as the year progressed. The trend resembles that of its more successful years but steeper, leading to a new all-time revenue high in January of 2025 that saw $63M of net revenue, according to our estimates.

This growth led to 2024 being Audible's best year of revenue, with $440M of net revenue, according to our estimates. And that's not all. While Q1 of 2025 isn't over yet, Audible's revenue is already higher than every other quarter before it!

With success comes competition, and while it seems impossible to compete with a behemoth like Amazon when it comes to books, Google and a few others are already doing it. I suspect we'll see that intensifying this year.

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.

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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.