Apptopia and Braze study: with 59M global installs, Netflix led rivals YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ in Q1, but more time was spent on YouTube Kids
Netflix may still dominate global streaming, but Disney+ has made a huge splash in the United States, where it launched in November.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q1 snapshot lands between two Nielsen datapoints that frame the streaming race: February's finding that streaming made up 19% of US TV watching, with Netflix taking 31% of TV-streaming time, and the July 2022 milestone when streaming's share first topped every other category at 34.8%. The Apptopia-Braze study adds an install-count lens to that arc — and complicates it, because raw downloads favor Netflix while actual time spent favors YouTube Kids.
Disney+ is the wildcard here: it had only been live in the United States since its November launch, so its Q1 install numbers reflect a brand-new service ramping against incumbents, a dynamic that resurfaced that December when Sensor Tower counted ~2.3M Disney+ app installations over the holiday weekend.
First-order effects
- Netflix enters Q2 holding the top spot in global app installs at 59M, ahead of YouTube, Amazon Prime, and the newly launched Disney+, giving it the strongest acquisition story among streamers.
- YouTube Kids captures more user time than Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+, meaning the highest-engagement streaming property belongs to Google, not the subscription-video leaders.
Second-order effects
- Disney+'s fast US install ramp pressures Netflix and Amazon Prime to defend family viewing — the segment where YouTube Kids currently owns attention — rather than compete only on catalog breadth.
- Divergent metrics (installs vs. time spent) make third-party trackers like Apptopia, Braze, and Sensor Tower the de facto scorekeepers of the streaming war, raising the stakes of their competing measurements.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — installs leading for subscription services, engagement concentrating in free, ad-supported kids content — streaming economics split into two models: subscriber-acquisition plays versus attention-and-advertising plays.
- The steady climb from Nielsen's 19% streaming share in early 2020 toward majority share points to a structural rebalancing where Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+ compete less against each other than against linear TV itself.
The trend: Streaming competition is shifting from who wins app installs to who wins daily attention, with kids' viewing emerging as the engagement battleground between subscription services and free platforms.