Temple Run races past 100m downloads, doubling its numbers in 4 months

Since we were early with this news, beating Imangi’s own press release, this post has been tweaked with a couple of updates.

Imangi Studios has revealed that Temple Run, its flagship title that we at TNW are unashamedly big fans of, has rushed past 100 million downloads, moving the popular game into the iOS and Android big time, just one year after it was first released.

What’s particularly impressive about the news — which was first quietly introduced via an app update — is that the game has hit the landmark figure just four months after it surpassed 50 million in April. Being free to download is undoubtedly a key part of its success but, moreover, the title is proof of the size of Android’s market.

Initially released for Apple’s App Store, Temple Run had around 40 million downloads earlier this year. While that’s an impressive figure, it began scaling headier heights after it released a Google Play-based version in March.

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That Android app racked up 1 million downloads in just three days as Android provided a spurt that took Temple Run to 50 million total downloads just days later.

“We never imagined that the game we were making and loved would be so well received around the world,” said Keith Shepherd, co-founder of Imangi Studios. “The last year has been incredible for us, and we are grateful to fans of the game. We hope to be able to provide them with more entertainment from the brand for years to come.”

Imangi reveals that, of the 100 million downloads, 68 million have come from iOS with 32 million downloads made to Android devices.

While the Android app has proven popular — quickly racking up more than 759,000 reviews at an average of 4.6 — the Google-owned platform brings the challenge of supporting devices and the associated user issues, as Shepherd recently explained on Twitter:

The problem is there are *so* many devices, os versions, and custom roms, etc. It’s pretty much impossible to support all.

So it becomes more of a support problem. We get 100x the support issues on Android vs iOS.

The company has developed a series of other title and, most notably, it launched Temple Run: Brave in partnership with Pixar/Disney. The title, priced at $0.99, includes a range of new features through the tie-in with the movie production giant.

If you don’t already have it, now is definitely the time to download the original Temple Run.

➤ Temple Run, for iOS and Android

Headline image via Flickr / Eviljohnius