According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, only safety and physiological comfort are more important than love in our search for self-fulfillment. Maslow was wrong. A stronger driving force than love, apparently, is the need to catch ‘em all, seeing how Pokemon Go has already been installed more times after a week than Tinder in five years.
According to data from SimilarWeb, Pokemon Go has already been installed on about 5 percent of Android smartphones, compared to Tinder on about 2 percent. Clearly, Pokemon fulfills a basic human need.
Tinder isn’t the only stalwart app that Pokemon is blowing out of the water. Pokemon Go is coming for Twitter too, and its 3 percent of daily active users on Android (as of Friday) is set to overtake the 3.5 percent of daily active users on Twitter, if it hasn’t already. Let’s not forget that Twitter has been around for a decade, while most of the world was completely unaware of Pokemon Go two weeks ago.
The data on iPhones is a little less specific, but Go has predictably topped the Apple app store as well, sending Nintendo stock surging. Pokemon Go is clearly a bona fide fad. People are coming across dead bodies while playing and trying to hack the app with drones, but that’s small fish. You know you’ve made it when robbers decide to use your app to lure victims.
Of course, the precise fact that this is a fad means that the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ll be surprised if Pokemon Go still has more daily active users than Twitter once it, too, has been around for a decade.
But until then, is it really any surprise that catching Pokemon in the real world is such a delight? Augmented reality that makes you exercise and battle monsters and sends you to a strip club? Swipe right, please.
[SimilarWeb via Business Insider]