This Week in Apps - Cartoon Money?

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. The New AI Cartoon Trend Caused a Big Spike in Downloads for These Apps

The internet was buzzing with cartooned photos this week after OpenAI released an update to ChatGPT's image generation capabilities. There are lots of clever ways to leverage these new capabilities, but for some reason a lot of users decided to cartoon themselves and share it online.

The trend got so big that a bunch of developers bet on it by shipping apps for that very quickly!

And the downloads came. Not for those new apps but rather for two incumbents because cartooning photos is nothing new on the App Store and Google Play.

I looked at every app that turns photos into cartoons using Explorer. There were more than I expected, and not new ones either. Although ChatGPT made this hot, the technology has been around for a while. In fact, OpenAI's image generation isn't available via API so it can't be easily wrapped into an app. Developers who jumped on this opportunity used something else.

But of the many apps I looked at, only two saw a noticeable increase in downloads: ToonApp and ToonMe.

Can you guess why?

The two are the top results (or top 5) for every keyword combination that includes "cartoon" in this context. They were ready for this wave even though both were released more than four years ago (2020 and 2021).

According to our App Intelligence, ToonApp's downloads rose 59% and ToonMe's by a whopping 221% on Friday, compared to an average day.

In more absolute terms, all the hype resulted in 61K and 184K additional downloads for the apps, respectively, between Wednesday and Friday. Additional means downloads above the daily average.

Money, please?

Unlike the surge in downloads, revenue for both remains fairly similar to its daily average. That's surprising, considering both apps are very aggressive with their paywalls, showing you a paywall on launch with a well-hidden close button.

But both also offer a free three-day trial which could be why the revenue hasn't kicked in yet. We'll know in a few days, and I'll follow up with an update in next week's newsletter (so make sure you're subscribed).

There's a lesson here for developers - be ready. ToonApp and ToonMe have very optimized product pages. The screenshots are focused, they have a video of the app in action, and their keywords are on point. They're playing the ASO game very well, and that's why they're winning right now and not the many apps that launched in the last few days.

Is your app ready?

2. Chrome is the Most Downloaded 3rd Party Browser on iOS. Are Apple Search Ads Behind the Downloads?

I've been seeing a lot of ads on the App Store for Google Chrome. The downloads show Chrome is the most downloaded not-Safari browser on the App Store, but how far ahead is it, and is its investment into visibility on the App Store different than that of the competition?

Very, and yes.

I summed up the downloads for the top browsers on the App Store in 2024, which include the browser that got me into web development many years ago, and the results are veeery skewed.

Chrome was the most downloaded 3rd party browser in the App Store in 2024. It got a whopping 71M new downloads globally, led by the US, China, India, and Brazil. With the exception of China, the other three are usually big downloaders on Google Play.

In second place we have Microsoft Edge. Yes, Microsoft. I didn't really expect that until I saw its ASA campaign. Edge got 18M downloads in 2024 from the App Store, according to our estimates.

Opera, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo each got between 5M and 7M downloads, and together totaled 26M downloads in 2024. Barely beating Edge and faaaar away behind the race when compared to Chrome. Seeing their ASA campaigns, I'm not surprised.

When we add them all up, Chrome's share comes out to 62%. Wow!

It should come as no surprise that Google is the biggest spender on Apple Search Ads, and not by a little.

Just like the downloads, Edge gets close while the rest are barely even noticeable, but Google is by far the biggest spender.

I used our Apple Search Ads Intelligence, which lets me see all of the keywords any app is using in their Apple Search Ads campaigns, to compare the top browsers. By the way, you can do that too.

Our data show that Chrome was seen across 8.7K keywords in the US. I looked through the list and it's very interesting. Google is investing heavily in brand protection by being the top bidder on every keyword that vaguely resembles "chrome" including misspelled words, words with missing letters, and words that sound somewhat similar.

Some in the UA community believe this is a must for any brand. I don't think so myself, but regardless, it's very expensive.

The campaigns also stretch to generic popular keywords like "tiktok", "youtube", and "canva", likely using ASA's search match. Here, Google isn't the leader but just another app that shows up sometimes, conserving some budget.

Edge comes in second, again, with a campaign that's less than half the size, just 3.1K keywords. I should reserve "just" for the other browsers because it looks like they're barely trying. Opera's campaign has a little more than 700 keywords while Firefox's - the browser that started it all for me - is being seen in just about 100 keywords.

Are Opera, Mozilla, and others letting Chrome win on purpose? By extension, are you letting your competitors outpace you with their ASA campaigns? Ads are expensive, sure, but there are a variety of ways to optimize them to get more bang for your buck using data.

3. Supercell Tries Something New with mo.co - Is It a Success By the Numbers?

Supercell has a new game out and it's doing a few things differently. We've been following every Supercell release and I was very curious to see if this new approach will improve downloads, revenue, and revenue per download - the important things.

The new game is called mo.co, and the story behind it is the first "new" thing. The game revolves around a startup that hunts monsters. A business. In a game. Strange for a massive multiplayer game about hunting monsters.

I doubt that will impact revenue. What's more likely to impact it is how it's monetizing and how it's acquiring users.

Let's start with user acquisition. Unlike previous titles, mo.co is an invite-only game, following recent trends in social apps. Anyone can sign up to play - or "hunt" as Supercell refers to it - but you'll have to wait on a waiting list unless you can get someone who's already in and played enough to invite you.

Invite-only acquisition is tricky. On the one hand, a waiting list is a great way to generate excitement and create a community. People go gaga for things they can't have. But on the other, it could limit downloads., preventing the app from reaching the top charts.

Mo.co peaked at #4 in the Games top chart on the App Store (US) about a day after its release but has since dropped significantly. Right now it's #343.

Its icon isn't very game-like either. I wonder how much that's impacting downloads.

Next, revenue. You can't pay to win in mo.co. Instead, the in-app purchases the game provides are for customization. Many users love and praise this approach for being more fair and making the game more enjoyable. But, this approach gives less incentive to spend money. At least to the very casual users.

Did it work? I compared the first 11 days of data, which is what we have right now, to the same period for Supercell's Squad Busters and Brawl Stars and if we only look at the numbers the answer is absolutely not.

Mo.co so fewer downloads and earned less revenue than both other titles. And when you look at the revenue per download, it's also the lowest of the three. We estimate that so far, every download generated just $0.48 in player spending for mo.co vs. $0.64 and a whopping $1.45 for Brawl Stars and Squad Busters during their first 11 days on the App Store and Google Play, respectively.

My conclusion: Supercell is focused on building a community of casual gamers and not on squeezing every penny with a new title.

Reading reviews (because I don't have an invite...), it looks like mo.co combines several things that work in mobile, even if not necessarily just for games, and the result is a weird mix of a hybrid-casual game that easy to play initially but progresses, and that's focused on building up players and not just monetizing them.

The real question here is whether it work in the long term. I think so, but it's too early to tell.

4. We Thought Apple Invites Would Sherlock the Market But It Didn't. This Happened Instead.

When Apple rolled out Apple invites, seemingly out of nowhere, a few months ago, everyone on the internet was ready for the entire invite app market to collapse. Or, as seasoned developers would call it: sherlocked.

It happened enough times before that it was expected. The warm reception Apple Invites got didn't help much.

We've got a few months of data now and it's time to see just how bad incumbents like Partiful, Evite, and other invite apps got sherlocked. Or, did they at all?

Before we look at the competitive landscape, we have to look at Apple Invites. Apple Invites had a very strong release, adding 1.6M new downloads in its first week on the App Store, according to our App Intelligence.

Downloads trended down fairly quickly, averaging 45K per day for most of February and continued to drop in March averaging 25K daily downloads for most of the month.

In total, our estimates show Apple invites had 3.3M downloads since its release.

Now that we have some context, let's take a look at the competition. For this, I rounded up the top invite apps - not including business tools which don't really compete here - and looked at the downloads since the release of Apple Invites compared to the same period last year.

I only half expected these results:

Just glancing at the comparison it's clear sherlocking didn't happen here. At all.

Every single invite app in the collection saw more downloads after Apple invites was released vs. last year, and it makes perfect sense. Apple showed people who didn't really know about invite apps that they existed, and Apple Invites being somewhat basic and only available on the App Store drove them to look for alternatives.

Evite's downloads rose 7%, Paperless Post's downloads rose by 10%, and Partiful, the app everyone mentioned in comparison to Apple Invites back in February, saw downloads rise 295%.

Punchbowl was the only competitor that didn't see any increase, but it's the smallest of the bunch.

So, what's going on here?

Apple's catering to a totally different audience!

The invitation market for apps wasn't very big before Apple got into it and instead of taking users away from existing apps, Apple really created awareness for a product that's new for many millions. That's how it managed to get millions of downloads while every other app saw increases as well.

This is also evident when looking at the age and gender of Apple Invites vs the group's leader, Partiful. While Partiful's audience skews more young and is balanced between the genders, Apple Invites is more popular with men in older age groups (35 and up).

Not every release from Apple is a sherlock.

5. Signal Proves No Publicity is Bad Publicity as Downloads Double

Signal, the secure messaging app, was in the news last week after a journalist disclosed he was accidentally in a group chat with government and military leaders. This insight has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the impact on demand for Signal.

The news broke last Monday and ever since downloads have been on the rise.

On an average day, Signal gets 95K downloads, according to Appfigures Intelligence. On the 24th, the evening the news broke, downloads rose 26%. By Tuesday, downloads spiked to 193K and on Wednesday, downloads hit an almost all-time high with 195K, according to our estimates.

I dug into the data a bit more and noticed downloads from Yemen, the focus of the chat in question, rose nearly 5x - but the numbers are fairly small. The peak, in Yemen, reached about 1K downloads on Wednesday and has been dropping since.

The thing is, Signal really had nothing to do with any of this. The journalist didn't hack the app to get into the group chat, the encryption wasn't broken, and the service wasn't doing anything it wasn't supposed to.

The news wasn't great or relevant to the app yet, it resulted in Signal getting 350K more downloads than what was expected. That's a positive. If you're developer it's important to be ready for when your app is mentioned in the news. Hopefully not for something like this, but "no publicity is bad publicity".

App Intelligence for Everyone!

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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.