New data: Democrats love WhatsApp and Instagram, while Republicans prefer Pandora and Walmart

Democrats are more likely to use Instagram, WhatsApp and Zoom, while Republicans prefer Pandora and the Walmart app, according to new data from Start.io. 

Start.io studied anonymized mobile app data from 23.3 million Americans with Android phones, to determine the likelihood that someone would have a specific mobile app installed on their phone. Start.io then sliced that data by likely political affiliation, based on the company’s proprietary audience segmentation platform. 

Unsurprisingly, most major mobile apps are equally popular with Republicans and Democrats. Apps like Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix and YouTube all experience a difference in installation rates of less than 1 percent nationwide. 

However, there are a handful of popular mobile apps where the difference in installation rates across the U.S. were wider than 4 percent between likely Democrats and likely Republicans, according to an analysis by Start.io. 

Note: In some cases, both Republicans and Democrats installed specific mobile apps at a higher rate than the overall American public. This is likely due to differences in the demographics of politically engaged Americans, who tend to be older than the general population. 

Major apps popular with Democrats include

Major apps popular with Republicans include

 Start.io’s mobile advertising platform delivers hundreds of millions of ads per day to more than half a million active mobile apps. Its platform also gathers anonymized mobile data from more than 2 billion mobile users per month, based on their interactions with the ads the company delivers. 

Start.io uses these data signals for audience segmentation, allowing advertisers to better target their campaigns with specific types of consumers. 

One of Start.io’s more than 800 audience segments include likely political affiliation, based on a person’s anonymized mobile signals. Reach out to learn more about Start.io’s audience segmentation capabilities.