Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, open me up, it's newsletter time!
Every time you don’t share this email, a fake install is paid for.Share Email.
Hey Adam,
Happy Friday 😎
If you missed last week’s action-packed newsletter, you cancheck it out here.
Business
Mobile Signal
Lowe's (LOW) is scheduled to report earnings on 11/16. User sessions of the Lowe's app are up 23% YoY but down -4% QoQ. Dive deeper into LOW with a free trial of our Bloomberg Terminal App.
App Acquisition
Netflix has acquired Spry Fox, a mobile games developer specializing in "cozy games". Spry Fox's suite of mobile games has been installed 760k times in the past 365 days.
Duolingo recently published an app update for its community of language learners, forcing users to do their lessons in a specific order instead of letting them maneuver around. Sometimes it's good to offer choice and sometimes it's not. But when you've been successful offering choice for so long, it does feel like a strange move to take it away. As you can see from the chart, negative reviews spiked. These are not ratings, but rather written reviews that Apptopia Review Intelligence uses natural language processing to label as negative. Before the update, about 13.7% of all user reviews were labeled as negative, that spiked to 42.5% just a few days after the update. Also using Review Intel, I checked most used keywords since the update. Within the top 10 were "update", "new update", "layout", "new layout", "format", "new version", and "streak". All of these keywords were associated with a negative Impact Score from Apptopia, effecting the Overall Sentiment of users of the app. Duolingo should ask itself, what is my customer's love language?
Live shopping gets a lot of chatter in the US and Europe these days because its newer and we've seen it be a successful revenue driver in APAC. While we can't directly measure the success of live shopping on apps like YouTube and TikTok, there are dedicated live shopping apps like Whatnot, NTWRK and Popshop Live that we can directly measure. What we're seeing when looking at the top 8 dedicated live shopping apps is that it's a one horse race and that horse is named Whatnot. The total you see in the chart above includes Whatnot's numbers. Over the past year it has slowly grown the become almost the entire market.
This week, Birk Cooper, CMO of Fetch Rewards joins me for some full funnel fun. With 40% of Fetch's households retaining through a year, the app team has to be doing something right. Birk walks me through how he thinks about Fetch's best users and where he finds more of them. We touch on app store search, iterating on creatives and pivoting quickly once Apple's Tracking Transparency policies went into place. Fast forward to 22:13 if you're solely interested in hearing our favorite gameshow, Two Apps And a Lie.
The streaming giant has launched and/or acquired 35 mobile games to date, for a total of 34.1 million global downloads, 16% of which come from the United States, its leading market.