In short: Google+ dropped to a new usage low this month, AndroidHeadlines has learned, offering more context to Google’s newly announced decision to discontinue the struggling social media platform. Over the last 30 days, the mobile version of the service had some 2.5 million daily active users on Android and iOS combined, according to mobile insight provider Apptopia. Over half a million of those were from the United States, with another 345,000 being German, analytics platform App Ape estimates. As far as U.S. distribution is concerned, Android users outnumber iOS ones 285,000 to 238,000.
Background: Earlier today, Alphabet’s subsidiary described the low usage of Google+ as one of the main reasons for sunsetting the service, revealing that 90-percent of app sessions lasted less than five seconds. While that figure could be attributed to accidental launches, that doesn’t appear to have been the case in the U.S. where users of both the Android and iOS version of Google+ opened the app nearly three times per day. The company’s decision to discontinue Google+ came simultaneously with a late disclosure of a bug in People APIs that potentially compromised up to 500,000 users around the world by leaking their private profile fields to apps that had access to their public ones. While developers of 438 apps were able to take advantage of the bug, Google found no evidence of any one of them doing so or even being aware of it. However, due to the fact that the associated APIs only preserved two-week logs (ironically, for privacy reasons), the company isn’t able to verify that the bug wasn’t taken advantage of or find out how many users were actually affected if it was.
Impact: While Google+ will live on as an enterprise service, the fact that Google will be pulling the plug on the consumer version of the platform by the end of August 2019 isn’t surprising given how its usage numbers appear to be abysmal, fading in comparison to tens of millions of daily Twitter users and over a billion people that open Facebook at least once per day.