Silicon Valley loves a good battle. Whether it’s Facebook vs Google, Apple vs Samsung, or Uber vs Lyft, competitors duking it out for users is woven into the fabric of the tech industry. One of the most interesting battles currently shaping up is Instagram vs Snapchat—specifically in terms of stories, user growth and each app’s appeal to users, influencers, and thus advertisers.
Snapchat maker Snap Inc. reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company last week, and the results disappointed the market—particularly when it came to user growth. To understand how Snap is faring in its second quarter so far, we analyzed Snapchat’s 2Q17 estimated downloads to date, as a leading indicator of new user growth.
Snapchat Installs Decline in the Beginning of Q2
Based on my analysis of Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence data, downloads of Snapchat during April 2017 decreased by about 16 percent year-over-year worldwide on the App Store and Google Play, to approximately 21.1 million, down from 25.2 million in the year-ago quarter. By comparison,worldwide install for Snapchat competitor Instagram grew close to 19 percent YoY during the same period, from approximately 26.1 million to nearly 31 million.
As the chart above illustrates, Snapchat has shown an overall decline in new installs since spring 2016, while Instagram has only widened the gap between the two apps.
Looking beyond April, downloads for Snapchat declined further as it entered the second month of Q2. Between May 1 and May 10, 2017, Snapchat was installed about 6.2 million times across both stores, a 28 percent decrease from 8.6 million during the same period in 2016.
In contrast, Instagram continued its momentum during the first 10 days of May, with approximately 10.5 million downloads worldwide on both stores, up by 17 percent year-over-year from about nine million during the same period in May 2016.
Snap’s Second Quarter and Beyond
As the analysis shows, after a weak first quarter, Snap’s new user growth has failed to start off the second quarter on a positive note. The year-over-year drop in worldwide installs for April and early May could be indicative of the longer-term outlook for Snapchat’s Q2 performance, but a more definitive story will start to unfold in several weeks.
