COVID-19 App Economy: Instacart, Walmart, Costco Way Up, Uber And Lyft Drop Like Rocks

Lyft and Uber are at all-time low ranks in the App Store. Ride-sharing apps in China dropped 200 million sessions a month. But grocery delivery app Instacart is seeing record downloads, as is Walmart Grocery.

Coronavirus giveth, and coronavirus taketh away.

As we get more and more mobile-centric, the app economy increasingly mirrors the actual economy. And what we see in mobile provides big clues to what’s growing and what’s shrinking in our new COVID-19 reality.

Remember how Uber was the top app in travel for 2019, and Lyft was top-10?

Not any more.

“Uber’s ranking at 157 and Lyft is ranking at 241,” Apptopia vice president Adam Blacker told me on the TechFirst podcast. “So for Lyft, that’s its lowest rank in the United States app stores since Christmas 2015.”

It’s also the lowest ranking Apptopia has ever seen for Uber.

This mirrors what Apptopia saw in China, where apps for car-sharing and ride-hailing startups like Dida, Didi, and Hello dropped over 200 million sessions a month. (In China, those numbers are starting to rebound a little now as the country slowly passes the worst part of the Coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic.)

But it’s a totally different scene for grocery delivery.

Target’s Shipt app is surging. Walmart Grocery is hitting new highs every day. Wholesale and bulk club apps like those from Costco and BJ’s are growing fast. And grocery-delivery service Instacart is taking off.

“Instacart has broken download records for the past four or five days I believe,” Blacker says. “It’s getting around over 40,000 downloads [daily] and today I’m sure it will be even higher.”

Oddly, the same isn’t true for meal delivery. That might be a perception problem, if people consider getting a meal from Skip the Dishes or Uber Eats more of a risk than getting groceries and making the food themselves, or it might be the result of all of us stocking up on food and needing to use it.

Not shockingly, it’s not a good time to be an airline or a cruise ship operator. New downloads of airline apps are plummeting in the double digits, Blacker says, while hotel apps for chains like Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton and Intercontinental are also dropping globally.

The Royal Caribbean cruise line was getting about 10,000 app installs daily; now it’s down to 2,000 and falling.

Other categories that are growing? Education apps, as parents become home-schooling teachers for kids whose schools are closed. And remote working apps, as those same parents work from home rather than the office.

A full transcript of our conversation is available here.