App downloads are slightly down from January — but user acquisition is way up from last year

These days, even the down months are technically up.

The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index tracks the average daily download volume of the top 200 free iOS apps, and it shows a whopping 9.7 million daily downloads for February, which is 6 percent down from January. Still, that download volume is up 43 percent over last year’s. And Fiksu’s Cost Per Loyal User index, which measures the cost of acquiring a user who opens an app three times, is also down from the previous month, dipped 3 percent from January to $2.80. But that’s still quite a bit more than this time last year — 76 percent more.