The Pokemon GO Frenzy

Pokemon Go has been taking over lives for a week already, but there are no signs of mercy. The game’s daily active users have already skyrocketed to 21 million and look likely to overtake Snapchat and Google Maps.

There are about 11 million daily active users on Android, compared to Snapchat and Google Maps’ roughly 14 million. Given that Pokemon Go’s daily active users were only at 8 million a few days ago, adding another three million in the near future seems no big deal.

Snapchat is itself a relatively new fad (which, by the way, surpassed Twitter in daily active users in June) and Google Maps is basically a cornerstone of civilization. Who doesn’t need to get somewhere and who doesn’t prefer Google Maps over Apple Maps and whatever else is out there? Pokemon Go could even beat Maps as the biggest user of Google parent Alphabet’s mapping data.

By another metric, Pokemon Go is beating out Facebook. The social network still has more mobile users, but people spend more time per day trying to catch Pokemon than they do scrolling past people’s baby photos.

People are catching Pokemon at graves, catching trees, and bracing themselves for “sponsored” Pokemon locations. The hype has got to die out sometime, but it has only begun. After all, who knows when the madness will end, and who Pokemon Go will have overtaken by then?