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Business
Mobile Signal
Sea Limited (SE) is scheduled to report earnings on 8/16. IAP revenue of its mobile apps is down 34% YoY and down 31% QoQ. Dive deeper into SE with a free trial of our Bloomberg Terminal App.
App Acquisition
Amazon will acquire iRobot, a robotics company best known for the Roomba, for $1.7 billion. The app is used by around 2 million people every month.
App Acquisition
Cox Communications will acquire Axios, a news media outlet, for $525 million. The Axios app has been installed 900k times since launch in April 2020.
Calm just announced it is laying off 20% of its staff. The top two meditation apps have had a steady downward trend for engagement metrics since January 2021. User sessions of Calm are down 26.4% YoY in July, and Headspace is down a whopping 60.3%. However, this could just be the freeloaders leaving as Calm and Headspace grew Q2 IAP revenue by 17.6% and 12.8% YoY, respectively. Other smaller meditation apps have similar user engagement trends.
Crumbl Cookies is a fast growing cookie shop franchise, selling larger than usual cookies. If you're close enough, they will even deliver and if you're further away, boxes can be shipped. Daily active users have grown 115%, YTD. Stores are opening rapidly which is helping contribute to this. On several occasions recently, daily downloads of Crumbl have surpassed Starbucks, which is routinely the 2nd most downloaded QSR app, in the United States. The app has one of the highest user review sentiment scores I've ever laid eyes on, averaging 96%. People mostly love the cookies (I also imagine an app dedicated to puppy pictures could only score so poorly on sentiment) but they are also pleased with how easy and intuitive the ordering process is.
The Home Depot mobile app has been gaining 100% more downloads than the Lowe's app each month this year. Downloads are up 71% since Home Depot increased investment in its paid search strategy.