Singles Day 2019 Sets Shopping App Downloads Record on China's App Store

The consumer spectacle that is China's Singles Day, celebrated on November 11, has spilled beyond the country's borders in recent years, but this shopping-focused holiday continues to deliver the largest economic windfall in its home country. Case in point: China's largest online retailer, Alibaba, reported a record 286 billion RMB (approximately $40.8 billion) in sales yesterday alone. Meanwhile, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data reveals that Chinese consumers downloaded more shopping apps from the country's App Store on Singles Day 2019 than during any prior day, for a total of 2.8 million installs.

This record figure surpassed last Single Day's estimated 2.7 million shopping app installs by 4 percent. Last year's event had driven year-over-year growth of 13 percent from 2017's total of 2.4 million, as the chart below illustrates. The App Store's dedicated Shopping category launched in late 2015, and the first Singles Day subsequent to its debut drove approximately 1.8 million installs in China, one million less than in 2019, for growth of 56 percent since then.

The top 10 shopping apps on China's App Store for Singles Day 2019 accounted for approximately 1.7 million first-time installs, or about 61 percent of all new downloads for the category. This was up 21 percent year-over-year from the 1.4 million installs generated by the top 10 apps on Singles Day 2018.

This year's downloads were led by Alibaba's Taobao, which saw its first-time installs more than double Y/Y, growing 119 percent. The remainder of the top five apps by number of new users added were Pinduoduo, Suning, JD.com, and Tmall.

We will share more global Shopping category insights soon in our upcoming State of Shopping Apps 2019 report, exclusively for Sensor Tower enterprise customers.