Apple Arcade 'has 5m subscribers, with a churn rate of 20%'

 "Based on third party data services (e.g. SensorTower, which tracks downloads), Apple Arcade does not seem to be very popular. Most estimates suggest 5MM or fewer subscribers, which means the service is used by less than 0.5% of Apple’s 1.1B active iOS users.

[...]

Most telling, however, is Arcade’s churn. Roughly 20% of subscribers leave the service each month (implying an average tenure of only five months). This is three-and-a-half times the worst performing SVOD. In fact, Apple Arcade experiences more than twice the churn of HBO in the month after the finale of Game of Thrones… but every month! Note that Netflix’s churn is best in class by some margin."

Source:  Data from SensorTower and Antenna, cited by Matthew Ball in a blog post, 24th August 2021

TikTok has over 50m daily active users in the US

 "TikTok, in its lawsuit challenging a ban by the President Donald Trump administration, revealed its monthly users have grown almost 800 percent since January 2018, CNBC reported.

Back then, the app was used by around 11 million Americans, according to CNBC. Then a year later, that number more than doubled as TikTok reported 27 million monthly users.

And finally, by this year, the app was averaging 91 million users per month, with over 100 million by the time the pandemic had set in and was keeping Americans at home, and over 50 million who use the app every day, according to CNBC.

Globally, the app has seen an equivalent spike, with 55 million in January 2018 increasing to 689 million by July 2020, CNBC reported."

Source:  PYMNTS, reporting data from CNBC, 24th August 2020

515m people subscribe to Apple apps and services

"Sales of services such as streaming television content rose with billions of people locked in their homes, the company said. The segment, which includes iCloud storage as well as its streaming services for music and television shows, saw sales of $13.4bn, compared with analyst estimates of $12.9n, according to FactSet data. Cook said Apple had 515 million subscribers to apps and services, up by 125 million from one year earlier."
Source:  The Guardian, 30th April 2020
Note - I'm assuming that this is 'people' rather than devices

Over 2.1 billion people use Facebook's apps on a daily basis

"Facebook said over 2.1 billion people now use its family of applications—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—on a daily basis, and more than 2.7 billion do so on a monthly basis.
Facebook reported an average of 1.59 billion daily active users at the end of the second quarter, up 8% compared with the year-ago period. Wehner said gains in India, Indonesia and the Philippines helped drive growth."

Source:  AdWeek, 26th July 2019

There are 25m businesses on Instagram; half don't have a website

"We have 25 million businesses on the platform, half of whom don’t list a website. So Instagram is their digital platform. And so they’re already engaging with their customers in Feed and in Stories and through Direct (messaging). And so being able to turn that discovery and consideration mechanism into an actual purchase is something that I think is great for businesses, great for people, and truly could be good for our business."
Source:  Interview with Vishal Shah, Instagram's Head of Product, on Chaddar's Medium blog, 21st March 2019

National Geographic is the first brand to get to 100m followers on Instagram

"National Geographic ventured into uncharted territory last week, this time on Instagram, where it became the first brand to top 100 million followers. But the publisher’s success is more than organic. Its revenue from social advertising was up 80 percent in 2018 compared with the previous year."
Source:  AdWeek, 19th February 2019

450m people played a CNY game on Alipay in February 2019

"Chinese tech giants reported more user participation in the digital "red envelopes" during the Spring Festival holiday as Chinese zealously snatched lucky money for good fortune.
Some 450 million people participated in the game of collecting "five blessings" on payment platform Alipay to receive lucky money offered by Internet giant Alibaba, up 40 percent year on year, according to Ant Financial, Alibaba's finance arm.
WeChat, a popular instant messaging app by Tencent, another prominent player in the mobile payment realm, saw the number of red envelopes sent or received increase by 7.12 percent year on year to 823 million from Feb. 4 to Feb. 9, a report carried by the Economic Information Daily.
Giving cash in red envelopes (hongbao) is a traditional practice during the Spring Festival, which has been shifting online thanks to the increasing popularity of mobile payments in which people use apps to send, collect and draw virtual hongbaos on their smartphones."

Source:  China Daily, 11th February 2019

Burger King's 'Whopper Detour' campaign drove 1.5m app downloads

"Burger King boosted downloads of its mobile app by 1.5 million with its "Whopper Detour" stunt campaign that offered 1-cent Whoppers to smartphone users who were near rival McDonald's locations. José Cil, CEO of Burger King's parent company Restaurant Brands International (RBI), revealed the results as part of a quarterly earnings call with analysts on Feb. 11.
Customers had to download the upgraded Burger King app and get within 600 feet of a McDonald's restaurant to activate the offer. After customers placed an order, the app navigated them away from McDonald's and toward the nearest Burger King to pick up their food within an hour.
The campaign made the Burger King app the most downloaded app in Apple's App Store for several days in a row and the most downloaded QSR app in the U.S. among direct competitors in December, Cil said. RBI also owns Popeyes and Tim Hortons."

Source:  Mobile Marketer, 12th February 2019

Spotify spent nearly $340m to buy podcasting companies Gimlet and Anchor

"Spotify  doubled down on podcasts last week with a double deal to buy podcast networks Gimlet and Anchor. Those acquisitions were initially undisclosed, but Spotify has quietly confirmed that it spent €300 million, just shy of $340 million, to capture the companies.
That’s according to an SEC filing — hat-tip Recode’s Peter Kafka — which reveals that the transactions were “primarily in cash,” Spotify said. Kafka previously reported that Spotify paid around $200 million for Gimlet, which, if correct, would mean Anchor fetched the remaining $140 million."

Source:  TechCrunch, 14th February 2019

Mobile accounts for 77% of time online in the UK

"Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) now account for 77% of time online, up from 73% a year ago.
Females spend the greatest share of time on mobile devices at 84% compared to only 71% for males.
The ‘mobile only’ audience has grown by 7% points over the last year, up from 25% to 32% of the UK online adult population.
Platform share differs greatly by category. For example, smartphones account for over 85% share of time for instant messenger, coupons, maps, fitness trackers, books, social media, dating and online gaming categories. PCs and laptops account for over 50% of time spent on Education, Family and Automotive sites."
Source:  UKOM, January 2019

$322m was spent in Apple's App Store on New Year's Day 2019

"Apple has revealed that App Store customers worldwide set new spending records over the holidays, wrapping up a record-breaking year. App Store spending topped $1.22 billion (€1.07bn) between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Customers also spent over $322 million on New Year’s Day 2019 alone, setting a new single-day record.
“The App Store had a record-breaking holiday week and New Year’s Day. The holiday week was our biggest week ever with more than $1.22 billion spent on apps and games, and New Year’s Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Thanks to the inspiring work of our talented developers and the support of our incredible customers around the world, the App Store finished off an outstanding 2018 and kicked off 2019 with a bang.”"

Source:  Advanced Television, 4th January 2019

More than 100m devices with Amazon Alexa have been sold

"More than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold. That’s the all-too-rare actual number that Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, Dave Limp, revealed to me earlier this week. That’s not to say Amazon has finally decided to be completely transparent about device sales, however. While the company claims it outstripped its most optimistic expectations for the Echo Dot during the holiday season, Limp wouldn’t give a number for that. Instead, Limp says, Amazon is sold out of Dots through January, despite "pushing pallets of Echo Dots onto 747s and getting them from Hong Kong to here as quickly as we possibly could.""

Source:  The Verge, 4th January 2019

Note - I'd assume that at least 95% of these would be Echo devices

Also - Amazon has over 10,000 employees working on either Echo or Alexa

Also - There are now over 55,000 'skills' (apps), up 120% year on year

There are more than 10m apps ('mini programmes') on WeChat

"They may not be widely known outside of China, but Tencent’s mini program initiative to develop “apps” that live outside of app stores is bearing fruit after it clocked two notable landmarks: 200 million daily users and one million apps.
In recent years, Tencent’s WeChat  messaging app has blossomed into a universe of its own with myriad services that span from food delivery to getting loans. But the Chinese messaging app wants to lock users in for longer — and its mini program scheme appears to show promise.
Back in January 2017, Tencent introduced “mini programs,” which are essentially lightweight apps that run inside WeChat. When you need to hail a cab, for example, instead of downloading the standalone Didi Chuxing app, you can summon its mini program on WeChat in the blink of an eye.
WeChat now has over one million such mini programs, Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma said today at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. (Third-party analytics firm Aladdin mentioned this milestone in a June report.) That makes its ecosystem half the size of the Apple App Store, which recorded 2.1 million apps in April."

Source:  TechCrunch, 7th November 2018

Instagram has over a billion monthly active users

Source:  Techcrunch, 21st June 2018

Amazon has more than 100m Prime Members

"Prime – 13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year – both worldwide and in the U.S. Members in the U.S. now receive unlimited free two-day shipping on over 100 million different items. We expanded Prime to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and introduced Business Prime Shipping in the U.S. and Germany. We keep making Prime shipping faster as well, with Prime Free Same-Day and Prime Free One-Day delivery now in more than 8,000 cities and towns. Prime Now is available in more than 50 cities worldwide across nine countries. Prime Day 2017 was our biggest global shopping event ever (until surpassed by Cyber Monday), with more new Prime members joining Prime than any other day in our history.
[...]
Marketplace – In 2017, for the first time in our history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from our third-party sellers, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Over 300,000 U.S.-based SMBs started selling on Amazon in 2017, and Fulfillment by Amazon shipped billions of items for SMBs worldwide. Customers ordered more than 40 million items from SMBs worldwide during Prime Day 2017, growing their sales by more than 60 percent over Prime Day 2016. Our Global Selling program (enabling SMBs to sell products across national borders) grew by over 50% in 2017 and cross-border ecommerce by SMBs now represents more than 25% of total third-party sales.
Alexa – Customer embrace of Alexa continues, with Alexa-enabled devices among the best-selling items across all of Amazon. We’re seeing extremely strong adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own experiences with Alexa. There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa. The foundations of Alexa continue to get smarter every day too. We’ve developed and implemented an on-device fingerprinting technique, which keeps your device from waking up when it hears an Alexa commercial on TV. (This technology ensured that our Alexa Super Bowl commercial didn’t wake up millions of devices.) Far-field speech recognition (already very good) has improved by 15% over the last year; and in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, we’ve improved Alexa’s spoken language understanding by more than 25% over the last 12 months through enhancements in Alexa’s machine learning components and the use of semi-supervised learning techniques. (These semi-supervised learning techniques reduced the amount of labeled data needed to achieve the same accuracy improvement by 40 times!) Finally, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time required to teach Alexa new languages by using machine translation and transfer learning techniques, which allows us to serve customers in more countries (like India and Japan)."

Source:  Taken from Amazon's quarterly letter to shareholders, 18th April 2018

13m ARKit apps have been downloaded in 6 months

"iPhone and iPad users worldwide have installed more than 13 million augmented reality apps built expressly using Apple’s ARKit framework since they debuted on September 19 of last year, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data shows.
As the following charts reveal, these downloads have been heavily concentrated around a few key App Store categories, including Games, Utilities, and Lifestyle. In addition to this, we’ve put together top 10 rankings of the most downloaded free and paid ARKit-only apps and games, along with the highest grossing offerings so far in this growing space."
Source:  SensorTower, 28th March 2018

Apple's app store shrank for the first time ever in 2017

"The Apple App Store endured its first ever contraction in 2017 — dropping from 2.2 million published iOS apps in the beginning of the year to 2.1 million by year-end.
The news comes from a new report from Appfigures, according to TechCrunch. The App Store’s contraction was paired with the Google Play stores’ expansion — in 2017, it reportedly grew 30 percent to around 3.6 million apps.
The drop off, according to Appfigures, comes as a result of a few issues. Apple has begun pushing for stricter enforcement of app guidelines — meaning more apps were categorized as spam and removed. There were also technical changes to the App Store that required developers to adopt 64-bit architecture.
The change also reflects a purge of apps that were considered abandoned, outdated, or those that were out of step with current app-development guidelines. That clean-up began in 2016, but analysts suspect that purge may well have continued into 2017.
Other explanations for the great app thin-out include a temporary move to template-based apps, but that policy was relaxed over SMB complaints that the requirement made the App Store inaccessible for smaller businesses."

Source:  PYMTS, 5th April 2018

In-App transactions increased by 46% in 2017

"Marketers around the globe saw a 46% jump in in-app transactions last year, as shoppers continued to migrate toward mobile shopping platforms, according to a study by adtech firm Criteo.
North American retailers that offer a shopping app generate 67% of all e-commerce sales conducted on mobile devices, while in-app transactions make up two-thirds of mobile transactions for retailers that sell products in both an app and on a mobile site.
Shopping apps also had higher sales conversion rates of 21%, compared to the standard 6% on the mobile web. Retail categories with the highest share of mobile sales included sporting goods (44%), fashion/luxury (40%) and health/beauty (38%)."

Source;  Mobile Marketer, 22nd February 2018

Musical.ly users generated more than 10m Winter Olympics interactions in first weekend

"Musical.ly, the lip-synching video app with 60 million users, generated more than 10 million engagements during the first weekend of the Winter Olympics with broadcasts from social influencers Nia Sioux (@niasioux) and Ross Smith (@rosssmith) and the NBC Olympics channel (@nbcolympics), according to a news release. Muscial.ly partnered with NBC Sports Group to provide new ways for fans to experience the games, which opened last week in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
NBC Olympics is feeding content daily to Musical.ly users, such as event highlights, behind-the-scenes footage and GIFs. Musical.ly is also urging users to engage in the Olympics experience using two in-app hashtag challenges created with NBC and U.S. athletes such as skier Mikaela Shiffrin, figure skater Nathan Chen and snowboarder Chloe Kim."
Source:  Mobile Marketer, 16th February 2018

Foursquare supplies location technology to over 125,000 developers

"While the unbundling effort was a risky bet, it seems to have paid off for the company. Both apps have over 50 million monthly active users as of 2016, which has allowed Foursquare to put their foot on the gas with enterprise products.
For example, Pinpoint by Foursquare (an advertising product) now boasts more than half of the Ad Age 100 as advertisers. Attribution by Foursquare lets those brands measure how effective that advertising is. Attribution more than doubled revenue in 2017.
Developer tools are also an integral part of Foursquare’s business. The Pilgrim SDK and Places API “grew substantially,” according to a post by CEO Jeff Glueck, and now provides location tech to 125K+ developers.
Foursquare added 50+ new roles over 2017, including positions in engineering, sales, creative, business development, marketing, and ops. In 2018, the company is opening a new engineering office in Chicago, and plans to grow the team by 30 percent over the course of the year."

Source:  Techcrunch, 19th January 2018