Temu, a shopping app from Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, is having quite the run as the No. 1 app on the U.S. app stores. The mobile shopping app hit the top spot on the U.S. The app debuted in the App Store in September and has been staying at a very high position in the months since, such as the No. 1 free app on Google Play since December 29, 2022. Even more recently, Temu once again took the number one spot on the iOS App Store on January 3 and hasn't lost that position since.

With low costs on factory-to-consumer goods, Temu opens a broad horizon of products, from fast fashion and makes users share the app with friends for the prize of free products and it could be some cause for growth. Yet much of its new installs arrive with the help of the spend in marketing.

When TechCrunch featured Temu's explosive rise in November, the app had then seen a little over 5 million installs in the U.S. since launch, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower said at the time; today it says the app saw 5 million U.S. installs in January alone-a bump of 19% up from 4.2 million for the prior 22 days, from December 10 to December 31.

Sensor Tower estimates that Temu has reached a total of 19 million lifetime installs across the App Store and Google Play, with more than 18 million installs coming from the U.S.

The growth now has Temu outpacing rival Shein in terms of the daily installs. In October, Temu was averaging approximately 43,000 in the U.S., and Shein averaged about 62,000. In November, Temu's average daily installs rose to 185,000 while Shein's climbed to 70,000, and last month, Temu averaged 187,000 installs while Shein saw about 62,000.

The shopping app's rapid growth echoes how the video entertainment app TikTok became the world's most downloaded app in 2021, following years of disproportionate growth. The video app reached 2 billion lifetime downloads by 2020, including sister app Douyin in China, Sensor Tower said. Combined, the TikTok apps have now reached 4.1 billion installs.

Similar to Temu, most of the initial growth of TikTok happened because of marketing spend. Video app TikTok expanded its footprint in the U.S. and worldwide by majorly relying on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat's respective ad platforms to acquire their customers. For example, TikTok was famously stated to have spent $1 billion in ads in 2018 alone; it even became Snap's largest advertiser that year.

This way, if the investment in user acquisition is done upfront, then the brand could immediately start building and gain followers, which improved further the ability to personalize that For You feed with recommendations; eventually, the algorithm over time became very good at just knowing what videos would grab the most interest, and what has helped TikTok now become one of the biggest and most addictive apps in terms of time spent. As of 2020, kids and teens started to spend more time watching TikTok than they did on YouTube. And earlier this month, data from Insider Intelligence showed that all TikTok users in the U.S. now spent an average of nearly 1 hour a day on the app-that is, 55.8 minutes-compared with just 47.5 minutes on YouTube, including YouTube TV.

While Temu is far from TikTok's astronomical figures, it seems to be mimicking a similar growth pattern. The company is very aggressively advertising to attract users whose data it then uses to personalize the shopping experience. Indeed, one of the features of Temu is its own version of For You page that pushes users to browse trending items. The page is subtitled "Selected for You." Along with gamification features, Temu also heavily emphasizes its shop and product recommendation features on its homepage, all of which are driven by user data and usage.

Yet the app does not seem to be driven by social media. While the Temu hashtag (#temu) on TikTok is nearing 250 million views, that's not really a remarkable number for an app as big as TikTok where something like #dogs has 120.5 billion views. (Or, for a more direct comparison, #shein has 48.3 billion views.) That suggests Temu's rise isn't necessarily powered by viral videos among Gen Z users or influencer marketing, but rather more traditional digital advertising.

For example, Meta's ad library says Temu has run some 8,900 ads across Meta's various platforms just this month. The ads promote Temu's sales and its extremely discounted items, like $5 necklaces, $4 shirts, and $13 shoes, among other deals. These ads appear to be working to boost Temu’s installs, allowing the app to maintain its No. 1 slot on the App Store’s “Top Free” charts, which are largely powered by the number of downloads and download velocity, among other things.

Of course, having a high number of downloads doesn’t necessarily mean Temu’s app will maintain a high number of monthly active users. Nor does it mean those users won’t churn out of the app after their initial curiosity has been abated. Still, Temu’s download growth saw it ranking as the No. 1 “Breakout” shopping app by downloads in the U.S. for 2022, according to data.ai’s year-end “State of Mobile” report. (Data.ai calculates “Breakout” apps in terms of year-over-year growth across iOS and Google Play.)

Because Temu's growth is more recent, the app did not rank in the Top 10 apps in 2022 in either the U.S. or globally in terms of downloads, consumer spend, or monthly active users on this report. Most of those spots still went to social media apps, streamers, and dating apps like Bumble and Tinder. Amazon was the sole retailer to appear on both lists, though it was among the No. 7 app worldwide in active users and the No. 8 most downloaded in the U.S.

Temu's marketing investment is unlikely to pay off the same way TikTok did, though, as many other discount shopping apps experienced this kind of growth only to later fail as consumers quickly realized that $2 shirts and jeans were indeed deals that were too good to be true. Wish famously fumbled as consumers grew frustrated with long delivery times, fake listings, missing orders, poor customer service, and other things consumers expect from online retail in the age of Amazon.

Temu today holds a 4.7-star rating on the U.S. App Store, but those ratings have become less trustworthy over the years due to the ease with which companies can get away with fake reviews. Dig into the reviews further and you’ll find similar complaints to Wish, including scammy listings, damaged and delayed deliveries, incorrect orders and lack of customer service. Without fixing these issues, Temu appears more likely to take the route of Wish, not TikTok, regardless of what it spends.