If you use 2 Factor Authentication for anything, and I suspect many of you do, you need an authenticator app.
The authenticator apps category is probably one of the least exciting on the App Store and on Google Play, but! Need superceeds excitement.
How many downloads do you think authenticator apps even get per day? Try to guess before looking at the chart.
Easy answer - A lot more than you'd expect!
Microsoft and Google publish the two most popular authenticator apps.
Google's, which was released all the way back in 2010, went stale for a long time with little to no updates and lacking big features that made it convenient. Recently, however, the app got a major update and some of those big features it was sorely lacking.
Microsoft joined the arena in 2015 and has been a bit more active.
Unlike Google' authenticator, Microsoft's has been growing in popularity over the last few months. Slowly during the summer, but over the last couple of weeks, a lot faster.
In more absolute terms, Microsoft Authenticator saw downloads rise from 1.1M downloads per week in July to 2.1M downloads last week, according to our estimates.
Yes, more than two million people all around the world downloaded Microsoft's authenticator app last week. That's a lot more than I'd expected.
I wasn't sure if this surge was specific to Microsoft or if it was an increase for all apps so I compared it to Google Authenticator.
According to our App Intelligence, Google Authenticator's downloads didn't really change much between July and last week - both with roughly a million downloads.
I've used a bunch of different authenticator apps over the years but haven't used Microsoft's yet. Clearly, I'm in the minority.
Messaging, Authenticators, what's next?
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