JibJab Leads iMessage Enabled Apps in Download Growth Following iOS 10's Launch

As we revealed last week, the iMessage App Store is already brimming with supported apps. Some of these are new to Apple's mobile platform since the launch of iOS 10, some are sticker packs, but others have been popular long before the advent of iMessage interoperability.

This week, we looked at how adding this functionality affected pre-existing apps and found that, for some—particularly JibJab—the benefit of being a first mover on the iMessage App Store was profound in the week after its launch.

As you can see, the animated-sticker-making app JibJab, which has been available on the App Store since 2014, witnessed tremendous download growth of more than 1,500 percent for the week of September 12, 2016, compared to our baseline, the week of August 29, 2016. As one of the very first apps to debut on the iMessage App Store, JibJab also benefitted from featuring by Apple within the in-app storefront.

Also released in 2014, Tenor's GIF Keyboard was one of the first pre-existing sticker apps that updated to provide a much more seamless, copy-paste-free experience through iMessage integration. The launch prep appears to have been worth it, as its early arrival on the iMessage App Store resulted in a 129 percent increase in downloads for the week. Genius, a song lyric sharing app, and Giphy, the popular animated GIF search app, followed suit with 108 and 77 percent increases, respectively.

The top five was rounded out by Zynga's Words With Friends, the classic word building game, which received heavy featuring from Apple as one of the first gaming titles—and the only in our top 10—to feature direct iMessage integration. Its downloads for the week of September 12 grew an impressive 74 percent over two weeks prior.

Being a first mover on the iMessage Apps platform has clearly paid off for these apps—but what about those that chose to take the alternate approach of adding sticker packs for the debut of iOS 10? We'll take a look at how they fared next week when we revisit the iMessage App Store using data from our Store Intelligence platform.