Snap’s Bitmoji was one of the fastest growing apps of 2016

When you live with a nineteen-year-old first year, you hear about things like Friendmojis. You hear complaints about the fact that their avatar can only hang out with one friend’s animated character at a time. So you become aware of the popularity the app has with people who have multiple friends (a strange concept).

It’s unsurprising that an app that lets you create a Lizzie McGuire-esque animated version of yourself is popular with millenials. But Bitmoji’s popularity is staggering.

The Snapchat-owned app is only two and a half years old, and according to a new report by comScore, it’s growing even faster in the US than apps with actual purpose like Tinder and Uber. In December 2016 it grew by 5000 percent as compared to the same month in 2014, Mashable reports.

Bitmoji (forget about Snapchat for now) is Snap’s really interesting success story

When Snap acquired the app in February last year, Bitmoji had seen 1.2-million downloads in a month. In February 2017, the app was downloaded more than 15-million times .

These numbers speak for Snapchat’s staying power in a time when competitors seem intent on creating Snapchat clones for their own platforms — Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have all released their own version of the Snapchat Story in the past few months.

And according to comScore, Snapchat is second only to Facebook in terms of engagement.

“The growth we’re seeing for Bitmoji under Snap is partly uptake by Snapchat’s millions of existing pre-acquisition users, combined with some really compelling prompts within Snapchat that encourage new users to download and start using Bitmoji to enhance their snaps and text chats,” Sensor Tower cofounder Oliver Yeh told Mashable.

Snap went public this month with a successful IPO, but the company hasn’t been able to maintain that momentum. Shares currently sit on US$22,74 — down from the past week’s stable growth.

Featured image: downloadsource.fr via Flickr (CC 2.0, resized)