🗞 Elon the king maker. Again!

What. A. Week. The stock market was the main cause of joy, elation, concern, and ultimately confusion. [Appfigures]( [View in browser]( Happy Friday, {NAME} 👋 My entire week was consumed by what's going on with GameStop. Retail investors never showed this much force, and big money never reacted so extremely. We're only a few weeks into the new year and have already seen things go upside down more than once, whatever comes next is unknown, but one thing that's certain is that Elon Musk's influencer power is now at its highest. Ariel Index U.S. [Index:]( App Store 98.71, Google Play 76.69 While the stock market was raging this week, the Index remained relatively flat, albeit a tad negative, as back to school took away from game downloads across most genres. --------------------------------------------------------------- Apps 1. Gamestonk! The big story this week revolves around the stock market, [Reddit](, and GameStop. If you haven't heard yet, investors on Reddit were trying to show a short seller who's boss. The world wasn't ready for such a fight. [Robinhood](, which established itself as the app for regular people, was where it mostly played out. After a tweet from kingmaker Musk, downloads exploded, lifting Robinhood and Reddit to the top of the App Store. We estimate the uplift to have brought on nearly a million new users to Robinhood this week, triple the previous week, and about a half of that for Reddit. [Full report →]( --------------------------------------------------------------- App Intelligence for Everyone! The insights in this you're reading come from our built-for-everyone (aka. affordable) competitor intelligence platform. Developers, marketers, researchers, investors, and journalists all over the world rely on our intelligence every day. [Learn more →]( --------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Everyone's doing it! Early Thursday, [Robinhood]( announced it'll stop trading GameStop. Investors who wanted to get in before the big squeeze flocked to other trading platforms. Trading apps, new and old, all inched their way up the ranks. The more traditional [Fidelity](, [TD Ameritrade](, and [E*TRADE]( jumped into the top 20, and the more modern [Webull](, which takes on Robinhood directly, jumped to #2, right below Robinhood. These jumps are as unprecedented for these apps as is everything that's happened with the stock market this week, and also a reminder of how users will jump ship when they feel they're being manipulated. Most of these apps also stopped trading $GME at some point but resumed very quickly. --------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Taking on TikTok? Done with finance! This week, wannabe TikTok rival [Clash]( acquired rival [byte]( in an attempt to take on the king of short-form video. I looked at the downloads to estimate just how credible of a threat this is, and (un)fortunately, it isn't. In 2020, Clash, which is only available in the U.S., was download just about 400,000 times across the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. byte, which was released in January, had a much nicer year, bringing in an estimated 9.1M downloads. We estimate that [TikTok ended 2020 with 800,000,000 downloads](. --------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Big in China x2 Speaking of TikTok... In China, TikTok's home base, [TikTok lite (抖音极速版 - 集音符兑好礼)]( jumped to the top of the App Store this week. Downloads nearly quadrupled this week, from around 60K/day earlier in the month to more than 220K every day this week, according to our estimates. The main TikTok app in China is sitting at #3, averaging 120K downloads per day, based on our estimates. --------------------------------------------------------------- 5. Did you bet on the big fight? Last weekend, the UFC held a big fight between Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier, two big names in the UFC, for those, who like me, weren't aware. Big names = big bets, giving betting app [DraftKings]( a very big weekend in downloads. The app, which sees about 2,500 downloads on a regular day, saw downloads more than triple to 29K and 34K on Saturday and Sunday, based on our estimates. --------------------------------------------------------------- In Case You Missed It Bumble ASO Teardown Gunning for Tinder is no easy task, but Bumble sure tries. This week I analyzed its organic growth strategy on the App Store. [Give it a read →]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Share This Week in Apps Knowledge is power. Share this power with your friends and colleagues with this [link](. --------------------------------------------------------------- This Week in Apps is written by [Ariel Michaeli]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( © 2021 Appfigures Inc. 133 Chrystie st. New York, NY 10002 [Unsubscribe](