Facebook’s ranking for app downloads drops to new record low | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s ranking for app downloads drops to new record low

digitalinformationworld.com

47 pointsd00000133 comments

I don’t think this necessarily means anything. App download count will always favor newer apps that are still in their growth stage (TikTok is a good example of this).

Facebook is post growth stage and is probably at the point where it’s already hit, or close to hitting its peak market share. Most Facebook users have already installed the app and only ever need to reinstall it if they switch phones. Those that haven’t installed it/don’t use Facebook are unlikely to convert to new users at this point

Stock prices are based on future performance. A large part of the multiple is the RATE of growth. When rate of growth slows down the stock price will be down accordingly. So for all shareholders and employees things like this do matter.

Facebook in particular however is beyond the user growth phase. Everyone knows that, including investors.

Nobody expects FB to add billions of additional users, because that is close to impossible. Investors expect FB to instead defend its user base against new competitors, and to increase revenue per active user.

The p/e ratio of Meta reflects this expectation: it is conservatively low right now. If you use the distorted tech-company standards, it is even ridiculously low.

I don’t know—I still have a Facebook account, grudgingly, but I long ago removed the app from my phone. And I hear more and more people say that they’ve done the same. Facebook has a deeper problem than slowing user base growth. A lot of existing users view the service as a necessary evil at best, to be kept in a kind of containment.

I basically only open it to see what's happening locally, and always in a Firefox container.

I’d be more interested to see the Messenger stats. The FB site fulfils most if not all use cases of the app, other than notifications, so it’s entirely unnecessary for an occasional user to keep it rather than just using a browser.

However, they’ve made some annoying changes to Messenger that force you to download the app for basic things like checking your marketplace messages, even if you have no desire to interact via that app.

I just switch to "view as desktop site" if I need to check messages.

It does mean exactly what you laid out here and took as obvious —- many investors and shareholders did not —- that this is an indicator that Facebook is in post-growth. This is news because as little as 12 months ago people would’ve had spirited disagreements about this, but as more evidence emerges we see more and more nails in the coffin.

that would be true if people never change their phones

that also mean young generation doesn't participate in maintaining the rate of new installs

facebook dies by demography

This is purely related to Apple's App Store suddenly changing the way they rank apps and has no bearing on install volumes. Based on what I'm seeing if I had to guess they're more heavily weighting growth and discounting DAUs relative weighting. This potentially does make some sense if the App Store wants to surface and support newer/more rapidly growing apps at the expense of established applications probably with the aim of making the app market more competitive.

It has the potential to boost indies, as tech companies have long controlled the App Store Rankings. This is a breath of fresh air.

I uninstalled it. Even my spouse uninstalled it. I still have the account since it's tied to pages etc. My spouse still uses it a bit for work, but overall a lot less.

Some of that moved to Instagram but not for us. No Facebook makes me much happier.

I think we're still outliers but I do think this is becoming more common. Smarter people understand what's underlying these networks and try to avoid them.

I don't think you're an outlier. If anything, you're the majority. Most people I know use Facebook and Instagram sparingly and communicate with friends directly using Snapchat, iMessage, Messenger, or Whatsapp. It's not a complete shunning of Facebook/Meta (that feels like an outlier to me) but it's also not using Facebook the way Meta wants you to. They can't show ads in messages (yet).

The people I know use it a lot less after the design update, most of them just can't be botheres to learn a whole new UI.

I cannot even start to imagine how horrible it'll be for society to have ads in messages, the spread of misinformation will be 100x worse.

Facebook was the most used monthly mobile app worldwide Q12022.

WhatsApp was the second. Instagram was the third.

I bet the fourth will blow your mind...

It's Facebook Messenger.

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe.

Me too but I have no idea what large foreign market are using.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/03/23/top-app...

AppAnnie is the source, but you could use Facebook earnings as the source too as they reported 2.9B active users last quarter.

Only two companies in the world have apps that scale to 2+ billion users. Google and Facebook.

Why does it have any downloads at all? Isn't it pre-installed on almost every new phone?

Does the download-chart consider the pe-installed ones, e.g., though updates?

> Isn't it pre-installed on almost every new phone?

No - never seen Facebook pre-installed on any phone I’ve bought

In the eyes of Wall Street, it's all about growth. Facebook continues to be among the Top 3 or Top 5 apps in installed base but if you're not growing at the same pace as before, it's bad.

Facebook is obviously not likely to significantly grow their user base at this stage. There’s only so many people. Wall Street doesn’t expect them to do the impossible.

Or does it? Wall Street tends to do irrational stuff, and besides, there are still about four billion people in the world without a Facebook account, so there’s still room to grow.

Not on Apple ones.

Not on the Nokia XR20 I bought a few months ago

It is on Samsung phones and it pisses me off because there's no effective way from removing it short of rooting the device. Being able to "disable" it isn't good enough, I don't want their shitty apps on my phone - period. I'll be looking at other options next time I upgrade.

Actually there is. Enable dev mode on the phone and uninstall the fb apps via adb shell. It is usually rhe first thing I do on a Samsung phone. See: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-how-to-remove-faceb...

If it bleeds we can kill it.

Instagram is ranked at 10. WhatsApp is at 12, while Facebook is at 18.

"After looking at the statistics from this Thursday, the ranking for Facebook has fallen so much that its new position sits at number 41!"

18 versus 41 is a pretty big difference.

One of the best things I did years ago was to delete that cancer of an app and never look back.

Given that Facebook new users peaked a while ago, that ain't surprising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com