It has been about four days since the official release of the Pokemon GO app on the Google Play Store, and it has taken the world by storm. While it is officially only available for download in the US, Australia and New Zealand at the moment, that hasn’t stopped the rest of the world from finding ways to get the game on their device. It has been such a hit among Pokemon fans to the point the game’s servers are having a hard time to keep up. However, new data has surfaced indicating that the newly released game is far bigger than one might expect it to be.
According to SimilarWeb, an analytical company, Pokemon GO was already installed on 5.16% of Android devices in the US by July 8, which was two days after the official release. Pokemon GO also had a higher percentage of installations on US Android devices than Tinder by July 7. In terms of user engagement, Pokemon GO is absolutely dominating people’s lives. On average, 60% of people in the US who have downloaded the game, use it on a daily basis. That means, approximately 3% of the US Android population play the game. In a few days time, Pokemon GO is expected to beat the social media platform, Twitter in terms of daily active users. Twitter currently has around 3.5% of the US Android population using its app on a daily basis. Usage time of Pokemon GO has also been pretty high, standing at 43 minutes and 23 seconds a day, per user as of July 8. This is significantly higher than other apps such as, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger. All four apps are only used by its users for 30 minutes or less every day.
While it is not available for official download in the rest of the world, fans have been able to bypass downloading it from the Play Store and have instead opted to download the .APK file from various websites such as APKMirror. Since the release of the game, APKMirror has seen a steep increase of visitors, from just 600,000 visits on July 5, to over 4 million visits the next day. This is a huge 597% increase in visits. Pokemon GO also has a high app retention rate which is good news for the app, as it is less likely that a user will uninstall the game within 3-7 days of downloading it.