Governments across the world are advocating for social distancing and self-isolation. If we don't need to go to the store to get something, we don't. We're getting our essentials (really everything) delivered to us in an effort to minimize the risk of acquiring and/or spreading the virus.
With the help of Apptopia estimates, we've seen this play out through strong increases in new users of both delivery company apps, like FedEx, and package tracking apps, like Arrive.
Even though AfterShip Package Tracker looks like it's the big player in this space, that honor actually goes to Arrive. Arrive, owned by Shopify, is so much more widely used that because I wanted to show the increases its competitors are having, I had to make two charts.
Make Friday morning even better by getting data like this sent straight to your inbox.
I haven't used all of these apps so I can't say that Arrive's is that much better than its competitors. However, I have been using Arrive and I will tell you that the app is a dream to operate. The home screen is a feed of all of your packages and their current status. Because the app can connect to your Gmail account (I am not a privacy expert and cannot provide any insight on how secure this is and/or what information is being shared with Shopify), when a new package is shipped and you receive a confirmation email, the app automatically pulls that information in.
Delivery company mobile apps are also seeing an increase in new users. In addition to helping you send packages, these apps also acts as trackers. It goes without saying that the UPS app will not track a FedEx package for you, which is why package trackers have a place in the app economy.
The United States Postal Service app is the most notable of the grouping as its daily download numbers in April are the most in its lifetime.
New installs of package tracking apps are currently above the levels they were at for the holiday season. Wow. While delivery company apps are not rising above their levels of the holiday season (except for DHL, which is), they have seen strong year-over-year growth.
This post looked at net new daily installs (also known as new users or downloads) on a worldwide scale. If you're interested in going deeper to understand things like user retention, monthly active users, or the geographic breakdown of this data, please click the big blue button and start a conversation:
