The New Year’s holiday always promises a clean slate and the hopes of a successful upcoming year. For most it takes a few months to get a good grasp on the new year and really achieve those successes. But for one South End startup this will be the second year in a row that they have come out of the gates en fuego (on fire, if you will).
Last year, RunKeeper announced a New Year’s promotion to give-away the Pro version of their application for the entire month of January. The promotion was a HUGE success resulting in over 170,000 downloads that day and over 4 million in just four days. The app also jumped from being ranked over 200 to the fifth ranked free app in the entire app store.
This year, while less planned, started RunKeeper off on the right foot again with another huge jump in downloads, this time for their Android app.
RunKeeper woke up earlier this week to the news of their popular app being featured in the Android Market’s Health and Fitness section. Unsure of the initial affect that this would have, the team then saw some incredible results. Check out the wild results that RunKeeper saw just from being featured in the Android Market.
- 637% increase in average daily RunKeeper Android app downloads
- #3 in the Health and Fitness category (from previous rankings in the 20s)
- #288 in the entire Android App Market
I reached out to RunKeeper to see if they knew that the feature was coming or if they got totally surprised by the spike in downloads.
“We did get a heads up that there was a possibility we’d be featured, but didn’t know specifics around when. We were thrilled to see the placement and the resulting influx of new Android users…and the downloads continue to roll in,” replied Sarah Hodges the Director of Marketing for RunKeeper.
I also asked for some concrete download numbers, which weren’t granted to me. But, I did get a little graph that depicts the surge rather nicely.
Was 2011 the year of Apple and 2012 the year of Android?
