Downloads of applications revealing police places, private communications and portable safety applications reached records last weekend in the United States, amid ongoing protests nationwide over the killing of a white policeman for African-American George Floyd.
According to new data from Apptopia, which specializes in intelligence programs in the application store, the best applications for the US police scanner have been downloaded 213,000 times this week, including Friday, an increase of 125% over the previous weekend, and this Record for this group of applications.
These best-titled applications included Police Scanner, Police Police Scanner, Fire Police Scanner, and Police Scanner -50 among others.
Police Scanner got the most downloads for the group, with more than 19,000 downloads on Friday, nearly 24,000 downloads on Saturday, and over 35,700 downloads on Sunday.
In general it was noted that downloads were somewhat distributed among the app group, indicating that people were more likely to access these apps by searching the app store, rather than recommending and focusing on a specific app or ad of some sort.
In addition to the standard downloads of police scanners, two other applications also saw significant increases due to protests, namely Signal and Citizen, the Group Security app for real-time alerts and live video service.
The company found that Signal was downloaded about 37,000 times over the weekend, and Citizen installed more than 48,000 times. On Sunday, both applications broke new records for one-day downloads in the United States as well, with nearly 24,000 Citizen downloads and 15,000 Signals.
Police scanners and other communication applications were just some of the tools used to track protests over the weekend. Users have also communicated through social media posts via Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, including by posting and sharing videos, photos and other live events.
Some people believe that these platforms give a better window to what is happening on the ground in real time compared to news reports that edit or present content with bias and miss some of the main stories that will not receive attention.