[Software] A year of pandemic through apps: this is how Android downloads have evolved

[SougarLord]

 

Applications for remote study, physical activity and mobile video games experienced greater growth during the onset of the pandemic, compared to the moderate growth of dating apps and the decline in food delivery apps, which had to wait to relax the restrictions to grow.

 

Based on the traffic data from its application market, Uptodown has pointed out the applications that have accompanied the Spanish people at different times during the one-year-old pandemic, and the evolution of their use and po[CENSORED]rity throughout of the same.

 

   The beginning of the confinements and restrictive measures in April 2020 marked the beginning of the increase in downloads of distance education applications. The platform registered two million downloads in March, an increase of 214.4 percent compared to February (636,000). In February 2021, downloads have dropped to one million.

 

   These are applications such as Google Classroom, which went from 27,689 in January to almost a million downloads in March of last year on the Uptodown platform, or tools that are used to learn from mobile phones, such as Duolingo, Photomath, or the po[CENSORED]r U -Dictionary. These same apps saw a new surge in downloads in November, when 67 countries kept their schools closed, affecting 693 million children, roughly 40% of the world's students.

 

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   One of the steepest growth has been the ZOOM video calling tool. From an average of 11,000 downloads per month in 2019, from April to September 2020 it reached around one million downloads per month, with the highest peak, 1,323,652 downloads from the Uptodown platform, in April.

 

   Children's entertainment applications, such as the games Toca Life World, Princess Salon, My Town: Home Dollhouse, Club Penguin, or the Peppa Pig video app, have had a continuous rise in the number of downloads throughout 2020 : the highest peak did not occur at the beginning of the first wave coinciding with the closure of schools and more parents working at home, but month by month it has been experiencing continuous growth.

 

   In February 2021 the download traffic in this category is 4.5 times higher than in February 2020. Thus, Uptodown has registered 562,000 downloads in February of this year, compared to 120,000 downloads the previous year.

 

MOBILE GAMES, FITNESS, FOOD DELIVERY AND APPOINTMENTS

 

   The two waves of lockdowns, April and November, have also marked the peaks with the highest volume of downloads for mobile games, physical activity applications and food ordering applications, but with different intensities.

 

 The applications of activity or 'fitness' and measurement of sports performance experienced a marked rise in April (425,899 downloads, compared to 308,601 in March), along with brief increases in June and January. In February of this year, Uptodown recorded 286,000 downloads.

 

Demand for food delivery apps declined in March, with the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns, and increased growth in May, when the mobility restrictions of the first wave began to relax and shops to open (105,399 downloads in May, almost double compared to March, with 59,701).

 

   The mobile video game sector has experienced growth in the number of downloads. With a pronounced peak in March and April, downloads have remained higher than the previous year in all subsequent months.

 

   Thus, Uptodown recorded in January last year more than 58 million Android game downloads, which amounted to more than 75 million in March, and by January of this year they fell to 60 million.

 

   The most po[CENSORED]r games of the early pandemic months were PUBG Mobile, PUBG Lite, Free Fire, Fortnite, Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, and Gacha Life, which were joined by Among us starting in the summer.

 

And when it comes to dating services, applications of this type have experienced moderate declines, even having a slight rise in the months of the first wave, March and April, and in the beginning of the summer (June and July). In the statistics, Tinder is crowned as a great favorite (1,258,203 downloads in the period studied) followed closely by Grindr (1,041,567).