How many people are actually playing Pokémon Go?

It seems like everyone in America is playing Pokémon Go. 

It seems like everyone in America is playing Pokémon Go. For now, our best estimate is about 9.5 million daily active users.

Let us explain how we got there.

Data analytics firm SimilarWeb made a lot of noise this week when it published data that claimed Pokémon Go was used by almost as many people as Twitter.

It updated those numbers Wednesday and claims 5.9 percent of all U.S. Android users opened the Pokémon Go app on Monday, July 11. That’s almost double the 3 percent of Android users who opened the game on July 8.

SimilarWeb doesn’t specify how many people in the U.S. have Android devices, so let’s try to figure that one out separately. Pew Research Center found in October that 68 percent of American adults have smartphones. According to the latest Census data from July 2015, there are roughly 248 million U.S. adults. So that means there are roughly 168.5 million adult smartphone owners. Cool? Cool.

Now we turn to comScore, which found in January that 52.8 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers over the age of 13 use an Android. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that number is the same for the group of U.S. adults 18 and over. That leaves us with roughly 89 million U.S. adult Android users.

Circling back to SimilarWeb now, which you’ll remember found that 5.9 percent of those 89 million Android users opened Pokémon Go on Monday. That gives us 5.25 million daily users.

Easy!

We don’t have usage data on iOS users from SimilarWeb (the company doesn’t track iOS app usage yet). But we know from comScore that 43.6 percent of U.S. adult smartphone subscribers have iOS devices. That’s 73.5 million iOS smartphone users, when coupled Pew Research data.

Let’s pretend the same percentage of people who use Pokémon Go on Android also do so on iOS (5.9 percent). That leaves us with approximately 4.3 million daily Pokémon Go players on iOS.

4.3 million (iOS) + 5.25 million (Android) = 9.55 million total daily U.S. users for Pokémon Go.