Disney Plus exceeded the Hollywood studio's expectations at launch, to the point where users were reporting outages and login errors shortly. According to research firm Apptopia (via Variety), the app was downloaded on iOS and Android an estimated 3.2 million times on launch day, with the vast majority of downloads (unsurprisingly) coming from the US.
89% of downloads were reportedly in the US, while 9% were in Canada and just over 2% came from the Netherlands, the sole European launch territory. Note that since these are just mobile numbers, it doesn't take in to account the many people likely to be watching via browsers, Amazon's Fire devices and games consoles. That's a lot of downloads.
Across these devices, 1.3 million hours of TV shows and films were enjoyed on these apps yesterday, according to the firm's data. This data suggests that surpasses Amazon Prime's hours consumed yesterday, but is significantly behind Netflix, which totals at around 6 million hours in this report.
Where do Apptopia's numbers come from? The report itself doesn't specify, but Apptopia's own site breaks down its data like this: "Currently, we have hundreds of thousands of apps which directly connect their developer accounts to Apptopia. This allows us to gather all of their real performance data for all of their apps, across all countries. We use this data as our Learning Set to build thousands of different estimation models which let us accurately estimate performance for every app in iTunes and Google Play."
Apptopia states elsewhere on its site that its data has an average margin of error of about 20%. So don't take the numbers as hard fact. Still, it's an indication of Disney Plus' popularity, and the report notes that the app sits as the number one download on iOS in the US and Canada as of the publication time.
How to get the Disney Plus app
The Disney Plus app is available on pretty much all major platforms in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. Here are links to getting it on your respective platform if you're in the US: PS4, Xbox, Roku, Amazon's Fire devices, iOS, and Google Play.
If that somehow doesn't cover you, search for Disney Plus on the platform of your choice, and it should be there – unless you own a Nintendo Switch, where there is no Disney Plus app (so far).
Australia and New Zealand are next to get the app on November 19, with European territories including the UK finally diving in on March 31, 2020.
It's $6.99 a month to sign up to Disney Plus in the US, and if you're not sure you need it in your life just yet, you can get a 7-day trial where you can knock through the decades' worth of content currently on offer. Alternatively, some Verizon customers can get a year of Disney Plus for free. Check out our Disney Plus price guide for more on the service's cost, and how it compares to its streaming competitors.
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