New Data: Democrats Prefer Instagram and WhatsApp, While Republicans Like Pandora and Walmart

Most major mobile apps are equally popular with Republicans and Democrats, Start.io data suggests. Outliers include WhatsApp, Zoom Cloud Meetings, Pandora, Walmart and others.
Mobile App Popularity with Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.

What do your favorite mobile apps suggest about your political affiliation?  A handful of major mobile apps are more popular with Democrats than Republicans, and vice versa, according to a new study out this week from Start.io, which looked at anonymized mobile data signals from 23.3 million Americans with Android phones.

The study found that Democrats are more likely to have downloaded WhatsApp, Zoom Cloud Meetings, Instagram, Telegram, Google Translate, X (formerly Twitter), Uber and LinkedIn. Apps that are more popular with Republicans include Pandora, Walmart, NewsBreak, Cash App, SmartNews, Roku and Solitaire.

Most mobile apps are equally popular with Republicans and Democrats, with a less than 1 percent difference between the two groups in the download rates of Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix and YouTube nationwide, according to Start.io’s analysis.

Start.io also built a benchmark download rate for major mobile apps by studying a representative sample of Americans without a strong political affiliation. In some cases, both Democrats and Republicans downloaded specific mobile apps at higher rates than the average non-politically affiliated American. This is likely because the average Democrat and Republican tends to be older than the average non-politically affiliated American.

Start.io’s mobile advertising SDK runs inside more than 500,000 active mobile apps and delivers hundreds of millions of digital ads worldwide each day. The Start.io platform gathers anonymized mobile data from more than 2 billion mobile users per month, based on their interactions with the ads the company delivers. Start.io uses these data signals for audience segmentation, allowing advertisers to better target their campaigns with specific types of consumers.

Methodology

Start.io studied an anonymized sample of 23.3 million Americans with Android phones in November 2023, segmented into three groups: likely Democrats, likely Republicans and all Americans without regard to political affiliation. Using these three groups, the company studied the download rates of 100 major mobile apps and studied whether meaningful differences in download rates occurred, based on political affiliation.

About Start.io

Start.io is a mobile marketing and audience platform that is reinventing mobile marketing by leveraging the largest independent app distribution. Start.io's direct integration with over 500,000 monthly active apps provides access to unprecedented levels of global first-party data, which can be leveraged to understand and predict behaviors, identify new opportunities, and fuel growth. 

Source: Start.io