Microsoft Teams beats Slack to 50 million downloads on the Google Play Store, with a higher review score

Last year’s conversation about Microsoft Teams vs Slack has been somewhat moved on following the COVID-19 crisis, which drastically accelerated Team’s growth from 40 million to 75 million daily active users in only a month, a number released by Satya Nadella after the last quarter’s financial results.

Slack has not updated their number of daily active users since October last year, when last we heard it was an anaemic 12 million DAU. The company was of course also expected to benefit from the COVID-19 work-from-home crisis, with Slack in April saying they have seen a 350 percent growth in calls made and received via Slack, but appears to have been caught wrong-footed due to not being associated with video conferencing.

Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield, has claimed Teams is merely being used because it is bundled with Microsoft 365 and has said that they have much better engagement with Microsoft Teams, and much higher mobile use, saying 76% of their users are on mobile.

Today however even that advantage appears to be under question, with Microsoft Teams passing the Google Play 50 million download line before Slack, who is still marked as 10 million+.

It is also notable that Microsoft Teams has a higher review score than Slack, suggesting it is not quite the hated platform that Butterfield makes it out to be, or certainly that Slack is not loved that much more.

Microsoft has, of course, moved on to greater competition now, and it is notable that Zoom has more than 100 million downloads, while Google Meet has also passed 50 million downloads some time ago. Interestingly however at 4.4, Microsoft Teams still has a higher review score than Zoom’s 3.9 and Google Meet’s 3.8, suggesting Microsoft is doing something right with their app.

With the COVID-19 crisis set to remain an issue at least for this year, Microsoft is likely to parlay the crisis into making Teams a solid cornerstone of their Office Suite platform for years to come.

Thanks, Martin for the tip.