Draw Something has lost 2m daily players since it's peak

"Draw Something, an app that Zynga essentially bought for about $200 million, is in trouble.
It's gone from having more than 14 million players daily to around 12 million, according to AppData.
To try and reverse that, Zynga is today releasing a big update for the game that will give it a bunch of new features that fans have been craving."

Source:  BusinessInsider, 18th April 2012

Foursquare has 20m users

"In 2010, foursquare fans declared April 16 4sqDay (4/4^2 – nerds after our own heart!). Two years and two billion check-ins later, you’re still why we get out of bed each day. Thanks to all 20 million of you for making us part of your lives.
There are hundreds of amazing parties planned for tonight! Find one near you here. The foursquare team will be at meetups in NYC, SF, London, Ithaca, and Whitewater, WI – we hope to see you!"

Source:  Blog post by Foursquare, 16th April 2012

Earlier - 15m announced in February 2012

10m announced in June 2011

4m announced in October 2010

1m announced in April 2010

270,000 announced in January 2010

Instagram has 40 million users

"Instagram received a fair amount of press over the last week. First, 10 days ago, the app launched on Android. Then news of Facebook buying the tiny startup for $1 billion was everywhere from the Drudge Report to The Daily Show. The attention resulted in explosive growth. Since the launch of its Android app, Instagram’s user base grew from 30 to 40 million. That’s over 1,000,000 new users a day.
Rakshith, the creator of gramfeed, pinged us this morning after noticing the milestone from Instagram’s API. The 40 millionth user is valentinoelbuti. It seems at the time of this post’s writing, Instagram has exactly 40,026,379 users — or rather, roughly 5% of Facebook’s active user base."

Source:  TechCrunch, 13th April 2012

China has 365m mobile internet users

"According to a report on the state of development of China's mobile internet newly released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of the end of 2011, China's number of mobile internet users had reached 356 mln, an increase of 122 mln within one year. By the end of 2011, total smartphone users in China reached 190 mln, with daily mobile internet use per user at an average of 109 minutes a day. Most-used features included Tencent's (0700.HK) QQ instant messaging platform and other IM clients, as well as mobile search.
The proportion of smartphone users who surfed the internet over their phones multiple times a day was 60.2%, 13 percentage points more than the proportion of non-smartphone users who did the same. Although smartphone users were stickier in their use of the mobile internet, the average daily total time they spent surfing on their phones was not significantly greater than the time spent by non-smartphone users on theirs. Average total time spent online per day for smartphone users was 109 minutes, while average total time spent online per day for non-smartphone users was 106 minutes, a difference of only 2.9%.
In the second half of the past year, over 80% of mobile Internet users did not purchase mobile apps."

Source:  Beijing Evening News, via Marbridge Daily, 9th April 2012

Facebook paid approximately $28 per Instagram user

"A startup is acquired for any combination of the technology, talent, or the user base.

If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)

Compare that to acquisitions like Aardvark ($555/user) or Jaiku ($240/user), and it becomes clear which were likely technology or talent hires. The glaring exception is Yahoo’s famous $5.7 billion purchase of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999 — about $11,000 each for 520,000 monthly active users, or 10 times any other startup. (Broadcast.com skewed the chart so much, I had to leave it off.)"

Source:  Wired, 10th April 2012

Note - see the full post for lots of excellent charts, and analysis of cost per employee

The app Draw Something has has more than 50m downloads in 50 days

"Zynga has released a statement that says Draw Something has passed 50 million downloads, making it one of the fastest growing apps of all time. It's likely the only app to ever hit 50 million downloads in just 50 days.
"We believe it’s not only the fastest growing original mobile game of all time – 50 days to hit 50 million downloads - but one of the fastest growing web sensations that we’ve seen.  In addition, the game just regained its spot as the #1 paid app in the App Store, knocking off Angry Birds Space," says Zynga."

Source:  Business Insider, 4th April 2012

1m Android versions of Instagram were downloaded in the first 24 hours

"Eager Android users awaiting the release of Instagram scooped up a million copies in less than 24 hours.
The free photo-sharing app made its official appearance on Google Play yesterday following a pre-registration period on March 24 that captured 430,000 interested users. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told The New York Times yesterday that the app was grabbing 2,000 people each minute following its debut."

Source:  CNET, 5th April 2012

Apple's app stores generate over $5m in revenue each day

"Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Stores generated $5.4m worth of combined revenues daily in January 2012, according to new research from telecoms analyst, CCS Insight, and app store analytics firm, Distimo.
The findings are the first fruits of a new research offering, App VU Global, developed by the two companies. App VU Global combines extensive data with analysis of the performance of software stores and the global apps market, identifying trends, and offering detailed comparisons across all major app stores.
The research reveals that Apple continues to dominate in terms of download numbers, catalogue size and revenues. The iPhone and iPad app stores generated daily revenues of $3.3m and $2.1m respectively in January 2012. Google Play (formerly Android Market) saw a 31 per cent rise in daily revenue in January 2012, to $679,000, across both smartphones and Tablets. Other platforms are racing to secure third position, with Amazon and Microsoft recording the biggest growth in catalogue size."

Source:  Mobile Marketing, 4th April 2012

iPad users spend over $70,000 a day on newspaper & magazine content

"iPad users are willing to pay for premium content offered by newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand category. The category launched only six months ago, however more than 70k USD per day is already being made by the top 100 grossing Newsstand applications in the United States."

Source:  Distimo blog, 27th March 2012

Domino's Pizza generated £1m in sales through its mobile platform in one week

"Domino’s has announced that it took over £1m in sales through its mobile platform in a single week in Q1 2012.
In total e-commerce sales accounted for 50.6% of UK sales in the 13 week period up to March 25 2012, up 44.5% year-on-year to £59.3m.
Mobile payments made up 16.4% of total online sales, a slight increase on reports last month that the pizza company took 13% of digital sales through a tablet or smartphone."

Source:  Econsultancy, 28th March 2012

Mobile game Cut The Rope has been downloaded more than 100m times

"Global gaming company ZeptoLab today announced the release of its award-winning, physics-based game, Cut the Rope, in the Mac App Store. The game, which has been optimized for MacOS, features stunning high-resolution artwork and innovative game mechanics that have been optimized for computer gameplay.
With more than 100 million downloads, Cut the Rope has seen great success on both mobile phones and tablets. Now, with the MacOS version, players take on the challenge of cutting ropes, popping bubbles, collecting stars and feeding candy to a little green monster named Om Nom on a much bigger screen. The levels on Cut the Rope for MacOS have been specifically tailored for landscape screen orientation, and the game retains its striking, crisp images on monitors up to 2560×1440 resolution."

Source:  Press release from ZeptoLab, 22nd February 2012

Facebook refers nearly as much traffic to The Guardian as Google does

Click to enlarge

Source:  A chart used during a speech by Tanya Cordrey of The Guardian, reported by Journalism.co.uk, 21st March 2012
Note - see the full article for more stats & background

Angry Birds Space was downloaded 10m times in 3 days

10 million Angry Birds Space downloads in less than 3 days! Thanks to our fans, stay tuned for more! #angrybirdsspace
— Angry Birds (@AngryBirds) March 26, 2012

Source:  Tweet from Angry Birds, 26th March 2012

Mobile app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 20m times in 5 weeks

"Three weeks ago, we wrote about OMGPOP's mobile app, Draw Something. The ten-day-old social game had been downloaded more than 1.2 million times.
Now the company has shared even more staggering numbers with us.  In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times.
That's more users than 3-year-old Foursquare has. That's almost as many users as 1.5-year-old Instagram.
Draw Something is one of the fastest growing mobile apps of all time.
CEO Dan Porter tells us the game is generating 6-figures per day. His company has generated more revenue from the game in five weeks than the entire company generated last year. He hasn't spent a dime on marketing since the app's first week."

Source:  Business Insider, 12th March 2012

Instagram has been downloaded 27m times

"Photo-sharing app Instagram has nearly doubled its total number of registered users since December, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom announced Sunday at the South by Southwest conference.
Instagram, which launched two years ago, now boasts 27 million registered users, up from 15 million in December of last year, according to Systrom. Foursquare, by comparison, claims just under 20 million users, and was founded in March of 2009."

Source:  Huffington Post, 11th March 2012

Adele's mobile app has been downloaded 1.5m times

"Adele is closing in on 20m sales of her album 21, but the British singer has also been a big hit on Apple and Google's app stores.
The official Adele app has been downloaded more than 1.5m times on iPhone and Android, according to David Emery, head of marketing at Beggars Group, the parent company of Adele's label XL Recordings.
[...]
In terms of features, Adele's app is fairly standard – news, photos, videos, song previews and tour dates, as well as a social section for comments and photo postings.
Emery says the aim was less about selling more music and tickets, than to provide "another communication platform" for Adele's fans, sitting alongside her own website, Facebook and Twitter."

Source:  The Guardian, 7th March 2012

39% of Chinese iPhone users have never bought an app

"39% of China's iPhone users have jailbroken their iPhone and 38% have never purchased a mobile application, according to Chinese mobile advertising optimization platform Guohead.com's recently released Mobile Ad White Paper. 62% of China's iPhone users have purchased at least one app. The iTunes app store saw a dramatic increase in sales in the week following the addition of RMB payment support in November 2011, implying that many existing users were unwilling to purchases apps in part due to a lack of payment support.
Android users are more reluctant to purchase apps, with only 23% reporting they have purchased an app before, while 77% never had."

Source:  Sina Tech, via Marbridge Daily, 29th February 2012

25bn apps have been downloaded from the Apple App Store

"Apple® today announced that more than 25 billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store™ by the users of the more than 315 million iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® devices worldwide. The 25 billionth app downloaded, Where's My Water? Free, was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China. As the winner of the App Store Countdown to 25 Billion Apps, Chunli Fu will receive a $10,000 iTunes® Gift Card.
[...]
The revolutionary App Store offers more than 550,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 123 countries around the world, with more than 170,000 native iPad apps available. App Store customers can choose from an incredible range of apps in 21 categories, including Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel. The App Store has paid out more than four billion dollars to developers."

Source:  Press release from Apple, 5th March 2012

Earlier - 10bn announced on 22nd January 2011

5bn announced on 7th June 2010

1bn announced on 24th April 2009

There are fewer than 1m Google TVs in use - estimate

"Google and its partners have never said how many Google TV devices were bought by consumers since the platform’s debut, but the company said in the past that device activations have doubled since the  Google TV 2.0 software update late last year. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on any numbers for this story. However, there are some very useful clues hidden within Google’s Android Market statistics: Google publishes ballpark numbers about each and every app’s active install base — the number of devices an app is installed on right now — as part of its Market app pages.
Google TV comes with a number of pre-installed apps, which are also listed on the Android Market. One example of this is the TV and Movies app, which is basically Google TV’s programming guide — an essential part of the Google TV experience that most users wouldn’t dare to delete from their machines. The active install base for this app, according to Google’s Android Market, currently is 500,000 to 1 million. The same is true for all the other apps that come pre-installed with Google TV, which suggests that the number of Google TV devices that are currently being used by consumers is less than 1 million.
This data is supported by findings from Xyologic, which recently estimated that the install base for various preinstalled apps ranges from around 600,000 to 900,000 devices. I asked Xyologic co-founder Matthäus Krzykowski how the company gathers its data, and he told me that it estimates the install base of apps based on a number of data points, and usually only sees error margins of a few percentage points."

Source:  GigaOm, 28th February 2012

'Up to' 70% of UK smartphone users have never looked at the terms & conditions of their apps

"Companies including Facebook and Apple are gaining access to swathes of private data from individuals who agree to the terms and conditions when they download an app.
But according to a poll, up to 70 per cent of smart phone users never read such terms and conditions, leaving personal information, including text messages, their location and contacts, unwittingly exposed.
An investigation by the Sunday Times found that the data accessed via apps is often transmitted to “third party” companies, including advertisers."

Source:  Daily Telegraph, 26th February 2012

(The Sunday Times is behind a paywall, so I can't link to the original)