Until the recent Carl Icahn-inspired push for PayPal’s spin-off from parent company eBay, the big story for PayPal was the reinvention efforts for the company being driven by PayPal unit President David Marcus and his team.
So when we observed a huge jump by eBay’s PayPal app in the iTunes App Store based on our mining of iTunes data, we wanted to take a closer look to see how PayPal has been trending on the mobile front. It’s worth noting that the jump this past week resulted in PayPal reaching its highest overall App Store rank in nearly five months.
Below is a chart of PayPal’s recent trend in the overall App Store rankings:
Given the jump, we wanted to see how PayPal fares against other mobile wallet vendors including private competitors Square and LevelUP as well as public or already-acquired vendors including Google Wallet and LifeLock-acquired Lemon Wallet.
As the red line below shows, PayPal’s app has consistently ranked in the top 5-ranked ‘Finance’ apps. More interestingly, Venmo, a P2P mobile wallet app picked up by PayPal via its $800M acquisition of BrainTree has also trended in the top 20-ranked ‘Finance apps.
The performance of several PayPal comparables & competitors has been less favorable or consistent:
- Square which is rumored to be postponing its IPO ‘indefinitely’ due to revenue growth and valuation misalignment has seen mixed performance among its two apps. Wallet, which connects users with Square-registered merchants, has fallen in the ‘Lifestyle’ ranking while Cash, its P2P mobile wallet, has trended in the top 100 ‘Finance’ since launch.
- Google’s Wallet app has not been able to surpass either Venmo or PayPal’s app in the ‘Finance’ ranking highlighting what seems to be continued floundering in the payments arena by the search giant.
- LevelUp, backed by Google Ventures, T-Venture and Highland Capital, which was rumored to be valued at $172 million plus at its last financing in 2012 hasn’t seen much momentum within the App Store as well.
- Mobile payment startup Loop debuted its Wallet app in the ‘Lifestyle’ category on Feb. 19th but hasn’t seen any steady momentum in the rankings thus far.
Of course, the PayPal jump is likely due to a marketing push so we’ll continue to track whether PayPal is able maintain this momentum in the coming months. Sign up for the free CB Insights Mobile Momentum newsletter which highlights promising mobile apps from the iTunes App Store.
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