Apple’s changes in iOS 6 are already proving plenty beneficial for some of its developers, including mass transit app-maker Embark. The San Francisco-based startup has seen 1.3 million trips routed through its app since Apple decided to ditch Google Maps in favor of its own solution, which lacks integrated transit mapping options. Embarks’ suite of apps, which serve customers across 12 U.S. and international transit systems, have also been downloaded over 100,000 times since iOS 6 arrived, representing a huge upwards spike in traction.
Compare that to the startups previous rate of growth: it’s planned over 40 million trips total, but was doing just 2 million trips a month in January of this year. Now, it’s on pace to do around 4 million a month, achieving well over 1 million in the single week since iOS 6 was released to the public. Embark founder David Hodge tells me that the upwards curve of growth has been tremendous since the launch, with clear inflection point at the time of the iOS 6 release.
Around 70 percent of new users are coming from the new Apple Maps transit tab, with roughly 30 percent coming from the App Store, according to Hodge’s best estimates. He says that usage trends indicate users are finding the app through Apple Maps, but then coming back directly to the app itself in order to plan maps, since only one-fifth of total planned trips in NYC begin in the Maps app and then come through Embark.
The company has also added 1 million new downloads since January, putting the rate for adding new users at approximately 23,000 per week, far under the 100,000 it saw in the past week. A more than 330 percent increase is definitely statistically significant, but it’ll be interesting to see if that kind of bump continues in the long-term as a result of the iOS Maps change.