Twitch says its mobile app has been installed 83M+ times and will update in early July with live streaming, its social feed Twitch Pulse, and dark mode theme
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2017 Twitch's mobile app had become a serious surface in its own right: after bringing VOD playback to mobile in 2015 and extending to Android TV that December, the company now counts 83M+ installs. The early-July update turns the phone from a viewing companion into a broadcast device, adding live streaming from the app alongside a new social feed, Twitch Pulse, and a dark mode theme.
The move matters because it lands just as Twitch's audience trajectory steepens — eMarketer projected 37.5M monthly US viewers for 2020, on pace to pass 44M by 2022 — and because Pulse prefigures where the app eventually went: by 2024 Twitch had rebuilt the entire mobile experience around algorithmic discovery.
First-order effects
- Mobile users gain the ability to go live directly from their phones, lowering the barrier to broadcasting for creators without capture setups.
- Viewers get Twitch Pulse as a social layer inside the app plus a dark mode theme, both arriving in the early-July release.
Second-order effects
- A larger mobile footprint supports the audience growth curve eMarketer tracked, giving advertisers and partners a bigger addressable viewer base on iOS and Android.
- Pulse gives creators a reason to open the app between streams, deepening engagement beyond live watch time.
Third-order effects
- The July 2017 update is an early step in a line that runs through the 2024 mobile redesign to the revamped app that replaced the Following list with a recommended-content feed — mobile shifting from a follower-driven companion to an algorithmic discovery surface.
The trend: Twitch's mobile app has evolved from a passive viewing client into a full create-and-discover platform, with each redesign trading follow-based navigation for algorithmic feeds.