This app is absolutely exploding right now and it's all because of Snapchat
Quick: if you had to pick one app that had the-best-year-ever in 2016 what would you pick? Pokémon Go? Super Mario Run? Instagram?
How about Bitmoji?
That's right, the Snapchat-owned app for making customizable emoji is, by at least one measure, besting all the competition. The two-and-a-half-year-old app has seen explosive growth over the last year to become one of the fastest growing apps in the U.S, according to a new report from comScore.
Fueled by Snapchat's user base, the app is growing faster than Venmo, Tinder, Uber and Lyft, according to the report, which comes almost exactly a year after it was (unofficially) announced Snap was acquiring Bitmoji maker BitStrips.
Bitmoji's unique visitors grew more than 5000 percent in December 2016, compared with the same month in 2014, according to comScore. That's a staggering jump for any app but particularly impressive considering the app is still less than three years old.
Still not convinced? Consider this: Bitmoji saw 1.2 million downloads worldwide in February 2016, the month before it was acquired, according to app analytics from Sensor Tower. It closed out February this year with approximately 15 million downloads worldwide.
While impressive, these numbers say almost as much about Snapchat as they do about Bitmoji.
Despite the not completely unconvincing narrative that Facebook is slowly killing Snapchat with its clones of Stories, Evan Spiegel's app is still second only to Facebook when it comes to engagement, according to comScore.
So it's easy to see how that engagement translates to explosive growth for an app like Bitmoji that already caters to the Snapchat demographic.
"The growth we're seeing for Bitmoji under Snap is partly uptake by Snapchat's millions of existing pre-acquisition users, combined with some really compelling prompts within Snapchat that encourage new users to download and start using Bitmoji to enhance their snaps and text chats," Sensor Tower cofounder Oliver Yeh wrote in an email.
And, given Snapchat's recent expansion of Bitmoji features, it would seem that neither app is done growing quite yet.
Topics Snapchat
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
