About two weeks ago, Apple announced that the 25th billion download from the Apple App Store will soon be hit. Since this announcement, Apple has put a counter online, which shows the total downloads from the App Store up to the moment the 25th billion download will be hit.
Right now, a little over 100 million downloads remain for the milestone to be hit. We have been tracking this counter every hour and found several interesting figures in the data. When the total downloads are plotted for every hour we have collected the data, the download volumes appear be almost perfectly linear.
Total Downloads From Hour To Hour
Hence, a prediction of when the 25th billion download would be hit would be seemingly be easy. However, when looking at the data more closely, we see some interesting patterns. The graph below, which plots the hourly increase in downloads illustrates these patterns.
Increase In Downloads Per Hour
From this graph, the two weekend days, February 25 and 26, can be clearly distinguished from the other days. Another interesting pattern are the three spikes in the downloads each day.
The spikes can be explained by the number of people awake, especially in the countries from which many downloads originate (US, UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, China and South Korea for example). The graph below shows the downloads generated on February 21 (and the morning of February 22) in EST to illustrate this.
Increase In Downloads Per Hour February 21
The first spike occurs when the whole of the US is awake, around 11AM EST and it is afternoon in Europe (Asian Pacific region is still sleeping at that time). The downloads dip when the night falls in Europe at 4PM EST. Then another spike is visible when it’s afternoon in most of America and people in the Asian Pacific region start their business day around 6PM EST. Hourly downloads decrease again when people in the US go to sleep and increase when in the afternoon in the Asian Pacific region. The lowest point in the daily downloads occur when the whole of the US is asleep and the night starts in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Based on the historical data above, we have tried to estimate when the 25th billion app will be downloaded. Taking into account the trends and patterns lined out above, we estimate that this app will be downloaded on March 3, early morning EST.
Hendrik Koekkoek