Bans Haven't Put the Brakes on Electric Scooter App Growth, Which Is At 580% So Far This Year

Electric scooter sharing services may be facing an uphill battle when it comes to permitting and public opinion in the cities where they'd like to operate, but, despite some notable setbacks, new Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data shows that growth of first-time installs for the two most prominent app-based services has been considerable so far in 2018.

Even amid an outright ban in San Francisco, monthly downloads of the Bird and Lime apps have increased 580 percent between January and July, reaching more than 880,000 in the United States last month—seven times higher than the first 31 days of 2018.

Month-Over-Month Growth

As the chart below illustrates, both apps have grown their number of new users significantly each month so far in 2018, with the exception of Lime, which saw flat growth between January and February. It has grown a minimum of 16 percent month-over-month since that point, with rival Bird growing at least 29 percent sequentially.

Bird saw nearly 480,000 new installs across the App Store and Google Play in July, which was an almost 1,500 percent increase from January, when approximately 30,000 first-time users downloaded its app. Throughout 2018 to date, Bird has seen a compound monthly growth rate of 48.5 percent.

Outperformed by its largest competitor for the first time last month, Lime received an estimated 405,000 installs in July, which was 305 percent higher than the 130,000 it saw in January. Lime's compound monthly growth rate for 2018 to date stands at 22.1 percent.

Banned But Not Broken

To determine if San Francisco's ban of Bird and Lime scooters had an immediate impact on either app's growth, we looked at their installs since January on a weekly basis, which are seen in the following chart.

While the ban has no doubt blocked out thousands of potential new users from both services, our data shows that it has not had a noticeable effect on either's growth, as they have continued to grow in existing (and slightly more welcoming, at least for now) markets in the interim. Both services have also popped up in additional markets since the June ban.

Scooters from Bird and Lime are expected to return to San Francisco streets—and, undoubtedly, sidewalks—sometime in the next several weeks. Once that happens, we'll be able to update on what impact that has on growth of both apps during the remainder of 2018.