This Week in Apps: Apple’s vaping app ban, Disney+ gets installed, apps gear up for Black Friday

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App Store and app businesses? And which apps are everyone using?

As mid-November rolls around, we’re looking at a few big stories, including Apple’s decision to ban an entire category of apps due to health concerns, the launch of Disney+ from an app perspective, what Black Friday will mean for e-commerce apps, and more.

Fast Facts

With Disney+’s huge launch (10+ million users!) on everyone’s minds, it’s time to think about what these streaming newcomers mean for the overall landscape and the app stores. In this case, it seems that Disney+’s user base was highly mobile. The company itself announced more than 10 million users, while data on the Disney+ app’s first few days indicates it now has over 10 million downloads. It seems like consumers definitely want to take their new streaming service with them everywhere they go.

  • In 2020, App Annie forecasts consumers will spend more than 674 billion hours in the Entertainment and Video Player and Editor categories worldwide on Android phones, up from an expected 558 billion hours in 2019. Thanks to Disney+, Apple TV+ and soon, HBO Max, Peacock and Quibi, to making the landscape both richer and more complicated.
  • On its launch day, Disney+ hit #1 by iPhone Overall downloads at 8 AM in the U.S. and at 11 AM in Canada — an indication of the ability that strong IP has can really excite consumers to come out in droves. (Unfortunately, that led to some launch day glitches, too.)
  • Apptopia estimated Disney+ was downloaded 3.2 million times in its first 24 hours. The firm also estimated users collectively spent 1.3 million hours watching Disney+ on day one — ahead of Amazon Prime Video, but well behind Netflix.

  • Sensor Tower waited to collect a little more data instead. It found that the Disney+ app was installed approximately 9.6 million times in all available markets (the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands), since its U.S. launch on Tuesday, Nov. 12. For comparison’s sake, HBO Now’s U.S. launch only saw 180,000 installs in its first three days — or 2% of the Disney+ total. Combined with the test period installs in the Netherlands, the app has now been installed over 10 million times.
  • The hype around Disney+ has had a halo effect. Hulu and ESPN, which were offered in a bundle with Disney+, also grew as a result of the Disney+ launch. Sensor Tower found combined users of the apps in the U.S. and Canada were up 30% in the past week over the week prior.

Headlines

Apple removed all vaping apps from the App Store, citing CDC health concerns

The CDC says 42 people have died due to vaping product use and thousands more cases of lung injuries have been reported from 49 states. Now, Apple has made the controversial decision to remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its App Store — including those with news and information about vaping and even vaping-related games, Axios reported this week.

Some say Apple is helping to protect kids and teens by limiting their exposure to e-cigarette and vaping products, which are being used to addict a younger generation to nicotine and cause serious disease. Others argue that Apple is over-reaching. After all, many of the lung illnesses involve people who were vaping illegally obtained THC, studies indicated.

This isn’t the first time Apple has banned a category of apps because of what appear to be moral concerns. The company in the past had booted apps that promoted weed or depicted gun violence, for example. In the case of vaping apps, Apple cited the public health crisis and youth epidemic as contributing factors, telling Axios that:

We take great care to curate the App Store as a trusted place for customers, particularly youth, to download apps. We’re constantly evaluating apps, and consulting the latest evidence, to determine risks to users’ health and well-being. Recently, experts ranging from the CDC to the American Heart Association have attributed a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarette and vaping products, going so far as to call the spread of these devices a public health crisis and a youth epidemic. We agree, and we’ve updated our App Store Review Guidelines to reflect that apps encouraging or facilitating the use of these products are not permitted. As of today, these apps are no longer available to download.

Existing users will still be able to use their apps, but new users will not be able to download the banned apps going forward.

Minecraft Earth arrives 

Minecraft Earth launched early last week across 9 countries on both Android and iOS and now it’s come to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and several other markets. Some expect the app will rival the success of the AR breakout hit, Pokémon Go, which was thought at the time to be the precursor to a new wave of massive AR gaming titles. But in reality, that didn’t happen. The highly anticipated follow-up from Niantic, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite didn’t come close to competing with its predecessor, generating $12 million in its first month, compared with Pokémon Go’s first-month earnings of $300 million. With Minecraft Earth now sitting at No. 2 (c’mon, you can’t unseat Disney+) on the U.S. App Store, it seems there’s potential for another AR kingpin.

App Annie releases a user acquisition playbook

A top name in App Store intelligence, App Annie this week released a new how-to handbook focused on user acquisition strategies on mobile. Sure the free download is just a bit of lead gen for App Annie, but the guide promises to fill you in on all you need to know to be successful in acquiring mobile users. The playbook’s arrival follows App Annie’s acquisition of adtech insights firm Libring this fall, as it expands to cover more aspects of running an app business. Just as important as rankings and downloads are the very real costs associated with running an app business — including the cost of acquiring users.

Apple’s big bet on consumer privacy extends to the App Store with another app removal

Apple kicked out an app called Like Patrol that scraped Instagram data in order to make snooping on Instagram users easier. Subscribers could receive notifications when someone they followed commented on or liked a photo, for example, and was particularly focused on people in relationships. To be clear, this is the exact same sort of creepy stalking info that Instagram itself served to its users up until October when it shut down its Following tab. Apple didn’t have a problem with that surveillance then, because it was a feature in Instagram’s social network. Also, tracking likes and comments doesn’t really make Like Patrol a form of “stalkerware.” Instagram issued a cease-and-desist against the app, then Apple kicked it out of the App Store, saying it violated its guidelines.

Apple continues to pursue AR for its next big hardware push

Apple aims to release a combined VR and AR headset in 2021 or 2022 with a focus on gaming, watching videos, and virtual meetings, according to a report from Bloomberg. This will be followed by AR glasses in 2023. Internally, Apple is referring to the new OS supporting all this as rOS. But in the near term, the company will release a new iPad Pro in 2020 with a new camera module with two sensors, and a small hole for the 3D system which will let people create 3D reconstructions of rooms, objects, and people. Developers have been hearing Apple tout AR for some time, but this is a new confirmation of how important it is to Apple’s roadmap going forward.

Tinder is October’s top-grossing (non-game) app

Yep, you can buy love. Dating app giant Tinder earned $89 million during October, up 18% from last year. The other top apps in order were Netflix, YouTube, iQIYI, Pandora, Tencent Video, Google One, Youku, LINE, and LINE Manga.

Google details Kotlin momentum

Google’s Kotlin was already under the spotlight thanks to October’s Android Developer Summit, but Google this week shared a few highlights about Kotlin’s traction, ICYMI. It says nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps on the Play Store now use Kotlin, because of features like null safety, data classes, coroutines, and interoperability with the Java programming language. Now Google said it’s doubling down by releasing more Kotlin-first APIs — it released KTX extensions, including coroutines support, for Play Core. It also launched a new Associate Android Developer certification in Kotlin. 

Singles Day breaks records…in app downloads

Chinese consumers downloaded more shopping apps from China’s App Store on Singles Day 2019 than during any prior day, Sensor Tower found. During the consumer shopping holiday of November 11, Chinese users installed shopping apps a total of 2.8 million times. That’s up 4% from last year’s 2.7 million installs. This year, the top 10 shopping apps on China’s App Store accounted for approximately 1.7 million first-time installs, or about 61 percent of all new downloads for the category, the report said. By new users added, the reigning apps were Taobao, Pinduoduo, Suning, JD.com, and Tmall.

Shopping apps are getting ready for the biggest Black Friday ever

2019 is on track to be the biggest Black Friday event to date. Outside of China, there will be a 25% increase in time spent worldwide in shopping apps during the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Mobile shopping sales are also going to break records, it’s expected. And that won’t be the only week to benefit from the mobile shopping surge. Not including China, consumers will spend 2.2 billion hours in Shopping apps on Android phones worldwide during the week of Black Friday and the three weeks after, App Annie says. That will include 230 million hours spent in the U.S.

Already, retailers are getting ready. Wayfair added more 3D features to its shopping app this week. Target integrated Shipt’s same-day shopping to its mobile app. Walmart is putting color-coded maps in its app to direct shoppers to doorbusters. Amazon again went old school with an actual paper catalog of fashion deals, including those from its own brands. (Last year it did one for toys, which clearly must have worked.) The catalog doesn’t have prices, but uses photo recognition to launch the Amazon app instead.

App of the week: GitHub

At its annual Universe conference today, Microsoft-owned GitHub launched its first native mobile app. The app includes all the basic features you’d want from an app like this, but focuses on the sort of mobile use cases that would make the most sense — like sharing feedback on discussions, reviewing a few lines of code and merge changes, for example. The app now out in beta for iOS with Android support coming soon.

Game of the week: Epic’s Battle Breakers

Epic, the makers of Fortnite — which Polygon calls the “most important game of the decade” — announced a new RPG game called Battle Breakers over two years ago, but never widely launched it. Until now. Though Epic had to devote its resources to Fornite, a small team inside the company continued to work on Battle Breakers as more of a passion project. The game’s premise is that monsters from space trapped the world’s greatest heroes inside magical crystals. You have to fight to free them.

But what’s really interesting here is how the game rolled out.

As you may recall, Epic famously sidestepped the Play Store with the launch of Fortnite for Android last year. In order to avoid the Play Store’s 30% cut of transactions, anyone who wanted to get Fortnite Battle Royale on their Android phone had to go to the Fortnite website and download the Fortnite Launcher.

This process was a little more complicated, but it also set up Epic with its own means of offering direct game installs for millions of Android users. In October, it rebranded the installer app to just “Epic Games,”  a signal that Epic could be planning to launch its own games store on Android, the way it did with its Steam Alternative, the Epic Games Store for PCs.

And now, the other shoe has dropped. Battle Breakers was released through the Epic Games app, not Google Play. (The test version on the Play Store has been removed.)

The move comes at a time when many of the biggest app makers are taking a stand against the app stores’ high fees. Spotify, for example, has called such a fee anti-competitive — especially when Apple is a direct competitor with its own music service that’s built-in to the iPhone. Epic, meanwhile, has just cut out Google entirely. And it would probably do the same on iOS if sideloading was an option — which it could be one day, if Apple is forced to open up by regulators.

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