World Cup Causes 15% Spike in App Downloads, Says App Annie

27th July 2018 Dominic Whitlock

App Annie has released figures to suggest that app downloads from Q2 are 15% higher than the same time last year.

Over 28.4 billion apps were downloaded in Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. This number doesn’t include re-downloads or updates.

Also, $18.5 billion was spent on in-app purchases, which is a 20% rise from the second quarter in 2017.

The World Cup is being cited as the reason for this significant increase, as more and more fans were choosing to watch the tournament on their smartphones. Apps that streamed the World Cup, such as Fox Sports Go, had some of the highest megabytes per user statistics.

In the UK, users spent more than 6 million hours in Android’s leading sport apps during the first three weeks of the tournament. This is a major rise of 65% compared to the three weeks preceding it.

Facebook once again held the top four most downloaded apps; Facebook Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Although the company’s stock price plummeted, partly due to slow user growth, they have over 2.5 billion users using at least one of their apps.

It’s not just apps dedicated to football that have seen increased activity due to the World Cup. Tinder reported that the number of matches in Russia increased by 66% in the areas surrounding the stadiums.

CLiKD released special football-related questions, to help their users find a date based on their opinions of the tournament.