Below are my top takeaways from the holiday shopping weekend. I've defined the Black Friday weekend as Thanksgiving through Sunday, unless stated otherwise. All data is for the United States only. Today is technically Cyber Monday but I personally believe both Black Friday and Cyber Monday are dead. Black Friday sales started weeks ago and they're all available online as well. I mostly refer to this as the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend.
Amazon vs. Walmart
It's not surprising to me that Walmart was downloaded more as so many more people already have the Amazon app. Our downloads are in fact, new installs.
Smart Home Showdown
Once again, smart home apps are a popular holiday gift. Some new names making an entrance this holiday are SmartThings and geeni. SmartThings is a Samsung app to control all of its products such as televisions, lights and refrigerators. Geeni is compatible with Apple Health and has a whole host of smart products, such as cameras, that can be controlled through the app.
Eye Catchers
A few things popped that will likely not get much attention; Arrive - Package Tracker, Heads Up!, Affirm and Afterpay.
Affirm and Afterpay are both essentially personal credit apps that enable shoppers to buy things now with a payment plan to pay over time. These apps are being used more and more lately as they can have better terms and accessibility than traditional lending methods such as credit cards. While it could signal increased competition to the thriving credit card industry, it could also signal poor consumer economical conditions. Combined, these apps were downloaded 106k times over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
EDIT: After Cyber Monday, we added Klarna to the mix of alternative lenders and updated the data
With all of this shopping comes lots of shipping. Arrive enables people to track all of their packages in one place. Arrive was downloaded 168k times over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Heads Up! is a popular mobile game that seems to get played a lot during family get togethers as downloads The game was downloaded 62k times over the holiday weekend. The app costs $0.99 to download. Sunday was Heads Up!'s 7th most downloaded day in its existence (since 2013) for the United States.
Stay up-to-date this holiday quarter: track the latest trends in mobile retail.
