Is Pokémon GO Still Popular? Daily Active Users Drops As App Completes With Tinder, Twitter, Facebook

At the end of July, Pokémon GO use had reached extraordinary levels for a smart phone app, surpassing 40 million daily active users. One could be forgiven for getting the feeling that if you weren’t catching Pokémon, you were a bit out of touch.

As August approaches its end, that popularity has subsided a bit, according to a new analysis reported first in Bloomberg. The number of daily users has dropped to somewhere just above 30 million, an estimated reduction of about 15 million.

While that is a touch of bad news for Nintendo and Niantic, the company that designed the platform, it is great for other apps competing for the attention and time of users. Investors and executives at Facebook, Instagram, Tinder’s Match Group, Twitter and Snapchat may rest a little easier knowing that the Pokémon GO craze may not be as sustainable as once thought.

“Given the rapid rise in usage of the Pokémon Go app since the launch in July, investors have been concerned that this new user experience has been detracting from time spent on other mobile focused apps,” Victor Anthony, a senior analyst at Axiom Capital Management, an investment company, told Bloomberg.

Pokemon GO’s initial popularity — and, by the way, 30 million daily active users is still pretty good — was responsible for a massive spike in Nintendo’s value. In the early days of July, Nintendo shares jumped so high with the popularity of the smartphone app that it added more than $7 billion to the market value of the company.

“Pokemon GO has gone beyond success to become a phenomenon, topping the revenue grossing charts in the three regions into which it has been launched: the U.S., Australia and New Zealand,” Han Joon Kim, an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG, said at the time.

At its height, Pokemon GO beat out Twitter for daily active user counts. Facebook charted more than 1.5 billion monthly active mobile users earlier this year.