The coronavirus pandemic has pushed governments around the world to impose a lockdown in their respective countries and that has seen a surge in work-from-home policies being adopted by many.
Meetings, classes, and social interactions have shifted to the online space thanks to a number of group video calling apps at our disposal.
What’ll excite video conferencing app providers is their number of downloads, which has hit a record 62 million in just 7 days between 14 and 21 April according to App Annie report.
This was the highest growth among any category across the app store during that week.
The social networking video app Houseparty has also seen tremendous growth in Europe while more professional apps like Zoom and Skype have also seen a growth in the number of new users.
The biggest jump has been in the business apps segment, which has seen downloads increase by 45 percent compared to the previous week. This growth can be attributed to the increased usage of apps like Google’s Hangouts Meet, Microsoft Teams and even Zoom Cloud Meetings.
It hardly comes as a surprise that Zoom has topped the charts among video chat apps with 14 times more downloads than the weekly average during the fourth quarter of 2019. The result was even better in countries like UK, Germany, France, and Spain. Usage of the app in Italy saw tremendous growth with Zoom being downloaded 55 times more than last year's Q4 average.
Interestingly, one report was quoted claiming the Zoom app wasn’t even in the top 100 searches in the US app store around 9 March. This clearly indicates that Zoom has garnered a lot of new users during that period.
Google’s Hangouts Meet was also downloaded in large number during that period. Italy’s download rate reached 140 times more compared to Q4 last year.
The case with Microsoft Teams was no different and the app hit record numbers in terms of downloads, especially in Europe.
The report didn’t mention how video apps have surged in India however going by what’s happening in the US and Europe, there is no doubt that the Indian user base of video conference apps has also grown during the lockdown period in the country.
Seeing that the lockdown has been extended in the US and there are chances that might happen in other countries too, we might get to see more people joining this platform in the times to come.
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