Apptopia: COVID-19 quarantines have seen global downloads of Houseparty, Discord, Zoom, and Marco Polo skyrocket; Houseparty has seen ~652K downloads/day
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Context & Ripple Effects
Apptopia's download counts land mid-surge: days earlier, App Annie had already logged a record 62M videoconferencing downloads in a single week, and Houseparty was topping iOS charts across Australia, Canada, and the UK as a Zoom-style chat app with built-in games.
The numbers kept compounding after this report — Houseparty went on to claim 50M signups in a month and the top US social networking slot daily since March 20 — making this snapshot the earliest quantitative marker of how quickly quarantine behavior converted into installs.
First-order effects
- Houseparty, Discord, Zoom, and Marco Polo are all absorbing quarantined users at once, with Houseparty's ~652K downloads/day making it the fastest riser among the social-first options rather than the work-first ones.
Second-order effects
- Incumbents are forced to scale on emergency timelines — Google Meet reported 2M new users a day and 25x January usage levels — while SimilarWeb and Apptopia found Americans shifting to desktop platforms like Nextdoor, stretching capacity planning beyond mobile apps.
Third-order effects
- The open question these install spikes set up is retention: Apptopia's own follow-up a year later showed Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat holding gains while Zoom's US DAUs peaked around September 2020, suggesting lockdown-era leaders diverge sharply once quarantines ease.
The trend: COVID-19 quarantines compressed years of video-chat adoption into weeks, and the apps that convert install spikes into durable habits will define the post-pandemic social and conferencing landscape.