Wrapped - Was the Most Downloaded App in the US Just a Scam?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Up and Up and Up. Check out the full article for more insights.
An app catapulted to the top of the App Store last week and then disappeared abruptly. Fast risers aren't new, but abrupt disappearances are.
The app is Wrapped for Instagram and it claims to show you a variety of juicy stats about your IG account like your top friends, the number of hours you spent on IG, and more.
How many people want that? Well, let's have a look at the downloads:
According to our App Intelligence, Wrapped saw 2.9M downloads from the App Store, the only store it was available on, since launching in September.
The majority of those downloads - almost all of them - came between Thursday and Wednesday.
Wrapped's business model was to show some stats for free and charge for more granular data as a subscription.
Our estimates show Wrapped earned a total of $80K of net revenue in its time on the App Store. That's around $0.03/download, which is very little for an app that's so attractive and with so many downloads.
How can that be? And, why did it disappear?
Well...
A few things seem off about Wrapped. The first is that the data it's presenting isn't data you can get from Instagram directly. As Wrapped wasn't a Meta-owned app, there's really no way it could access such data. Users of the app have complained about the numbers not aligning with reality and even changing between uses.
On top of that, the app's privacy policy is a Notion document and the company does not have a working website.
The app's disappearance confirmed all of the concerns - Meta had Apple pull the app because it violated IG's terms, and judging by the speed that happened, I'm sure it was something serious.
I think it's safe to call this one a scam. I hope you didn't fall for it.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
