Sensor Tower: Application Report for the First Quarter of 2023

Sensor Tower released its "2023 Q1 App Report". Shein quickly rose to become one of the most downloaded apps in the world during this period. The data also shows that Japan has bucked the trend of a sharp decline in mobile app downloads. The report also reveals emerging AI application categories and their growth trajectories at the beginning of the year.

As Shein installations surged in the first quarter of 2023, four of the top five most downloaded apps in the United States were released by Chinese companies for the first time. Shein continues its rapid rise on the world stage, making it the 11th most downloaded app in the world. Attack Hole breaks into the top ten global games for the first time, with cumulative global downloads approaching 37 million.

Looking at the top five markets by App Store downloads, Japan stopped its downward trend and achieved 0.7% year-over-year growth in the first quarter. This is a remarkable achievement, while the other top five rankings fell by 1% to 8.6%. On Google Play, the situation was even worse, with declines ranging from 3% to nearly 9% in each of the top five markets.

In the first quarter of 2023, applications promoting AI capabilities emerged on the mobile application market. This category of applications has complex image editing functions and realistic interactive chat functions and is growing rapidly. In the first quarter, the application with the highest downloads and revenue was the AI ​​Chatbot developed by Vulcan Labs, with 9.5 million downloads and total revenue of US$3.3 million. The Chat With AI application released in early February this year was very popular and was downloaded 7.3 million times in the first quarter. Now, with the release of the official OpenAI ChatGPT application on the App Store, competition in this field will become more intense, and new entrants will need to compete with larger and well-funded publishers.