Downloads of the four largest food and grocery delivery apps in the United States and Canada fell 21% in 2026 to date, and more than a quarter of the installs that did happen came from paid sources, according to estimates published on October 30, 2026 by Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. Once its purchase of Instacart closes, DoorDash would account for 66% of the group's downloads, more than double Uber Eats at 26% and roughly eight times Grubhub at 8%. Instacart leaned hardest on paid acquisition of the four, with 39% of its downloads coming from paid sources in 2026 to date, up from 33% in 2025.

In Short

DoorDash, which has agreed to buy Instacart, would own the apps behind two of every three new downloads among the main food and grocery delivery apps in the US and Canada, according to Sensor Tower. Fewer people are downloading these apps every year, so the companies pay for a growing share of the downloads they still get, and Instacart pays for the most. For anyone who buys ads on these apps or competes with them, the figures describe one much larger player in a market where Sensor Tower says new customers are getting more expensive to win.

What Sensor Tower measured

The report, titled "DoorDash Adds Instacart to Its Cart," covers what Sensor Tower calls the US and Canada delivery cohort: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart and Grubhub. It arrived a day after DoorDash and Instacart announced their agreement on October 29, under which DoorDash would pay $65.00 a share, about $17 billion, a 26% premium to Instacart's closing price on October 22. Sensor Tower dates the announcement to October 28, which is the day the merger agreement was signed. The companies expect to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028.

Three operators that sell grocery delivery are left out. In a note on its method, Sensor Tower says: "Walmart Grocery, Amazon (Whole Foods) and Shipt (Target) are excluded as they do not have separate apps for delivery services." That exclusion matters for the way the report frames the deal, and it is examined further below.

The figures are modelled, not reported by the companies. "Sensor Tower mobile app and digital advertising estimates are based on our proprietary panel and data science models," according to the firm. "They may not accurately represent metrics for any app or advertiser, and should be used for directional trend analysis." The report gives shares and growth rates rather than absolute numbers of downloads, users or dollars. It does not state the end date of its 2026 year-to-date period, though its quarterly user series includes a fourth quarter to date, which places the cut-off in October. On October 21, PPC Land reported Sensor Tower's download estimates for Meta's Muse app.

The report lists Seema Shah, Sensor Tower's VP of Insights, and analysts Abraham Yousef, Kara Lee and Sneha Pandey as its contacts.

Two of every three downloads

The headline figure combines two apps that will remain separate until closing. "DoorDash is the de facto leader within the cohort; combining with Instacart also gives it the largest installed base," Sensor Tower writes. On downloads, DoorDash and Instacart together take 66% in 2026 to date. Uber Eats, the second-largest app, has 26%, and Grubhub has 8%.

Usage tells a similar story over a longer period. Sensor Tower's series for monthly active users in the US and Canada starts in 2019, when DoorDash and Uber Eats each held 34% of the cohort's users. Since then, DoorDash's share has risen in all but one year, while Uber Eats and Grubhub have declined.

Year DoorDash Uber Eats Instacart Grubhub
2019 34% 34% 11% 22%
2020 42% 29% 12% 17%
2021 45% 29% 11% 14%
2022 46% 28% 14% 11%
2023 49% 26% 15% -
2024 49% 25% 17% 9%
2025 53% 23% 17% 7%
2026 to date 56% 21% 17% 6%

Share of monthly active users in the US and Canada delivery cohort, Sensor Tower estimates. Sensor Tower does not state Grubhub's 2023 share; the remainder left by the other three is about 10%.

Added together, DoorDash and Instacart account for 73% of the cohort's monthly active users in 2026 to date, up from 45% in 2019, by PPC Land's arithmetic on Sensor Tower's rounded shares. That sum counts users of each app separately. Someone active on both apps appears twice, and the report gives no estimate of how many people use both, so the combined share is a measure of app usage, not of unique households.

The reversal at the top has been quick. In January 2019, Sensor Tower data ranked Uber Eats as the most downloaded food delivery app of 2018, both worldwide and in the United States. DoorDash was eighth on the worldwide list. Seven years later, by Sensor Tower's estimates, DoorDash has more than two and a half times Uber Eats' share of US and Canada users.

Fewer downloads every year since 2020

Scale is accumulating in a market that is no longer growing at the front door. Downloads across the four apps fell 21% in 2026 to date and 1% in 2025, according to Sensor Tower, and download growth for the cohort has been negative in every year since 2020, "when customer adoption soared due to the pandemic."

Sensor Tower draws a conclusion from that. "This suggests that market share, brand awareness and scale will be increasingly important to drive usage and engagement going forward," the report says. In its introduction, the firm also links slower adoption to customers who "increasingly pivot to in-person experiences," and lists "price competition, lack of switching costs and dependence on advertising to drive usage and engagement" as pressures on the sector. The report includes no data on in-person dining or shopping.

Usage has held up better than installs. Sensor Tower's quarterly series shows combined monthly users of the four apps still growing year over year in every quarter from the start of 2025 to the fourth quarter of 2026 to date, but at low single-digit rates through 2026, below the pace of 2025. In other words, the apps are competing mainly for people who already use delivery apps.

The slowdown in installs is not confined to delivery. When Adjust published its shopping app report in August 2025, it found North American e-commerce app installs down 15% in the first half of that year, with sessions down 5%.

A quarter of installs are paid for

With fewer people arriving on their own, the four apps have bought more of their downloads. Paid sources accounted for 25.9% of the cohort's downloads in 2026 to date, up from 21.0% in 2025 and 20.0% in 2024, according to Sensor Tower. The report does not define what counts as a paid source or explain how its models separate paid from unpaid installs.

Brand 2024 2025 2026 to date
DoorDash 21% 22% 25%
Uber Eats 25% 19% 25%
Instacart 24% 33% 39%
Grubhub 11% 11% 15%
Cohort total 20.0% 21.0% 25.9%

Share of US and Canada downloads from paid sources, Sensor Tower estimates.

Instacart stands apart. Its paid share rose 6 percentage points in a year to 39%, which Sensor Tower describes as "by far the largest in the cohort," and it is 15 points higher than in 2024, by PPC Land's count. Uber Eats took a different path, dropping from 25% to 19% in 2025 before returning to 25%. Grubhub, the smallest of the four, relies on paid installs least, though its share also rose in 2026.

Sensor Tower reads the trend as evidence that advertising is propping up adoption. "This suggests that without ad spend, customer adoption would have been even weaker, making the cost to acquire new users increasingly expensive," the report says. That is a claim about incrementality, meaning what the ads caused rather than what merely followed them, and the report presents no test that isolates it. It also gives no cost-per-install or acquisition-cost figures, so the "increasingly expensive" part rests on the direction of the shares, not on prices.

The wider app market offers some context. On October 28, AppsFlyer reported that ad spend rose on nine of the top 10 mobile media sources in its 2026 index, citing more attributed conversions and higher media costs.

Instacart's ad budget: up 56%, then down 8%

The second set of spending figures concerns the companies as advertisers, not as sellers of advertising. In 2025, Instacart increased its US and Canada digital ad spend by 56% year over year, according to Sensor Tower, ahead of DoorDash at 38%, Uber Eats at 34% and Grubhub, which cut spending by 3%.

Instacart's growth then slowed sharply. Its spending rose 8% in the first half of 2026 and fell 8% in the third quarter, compared with the same periods a year earlier. The report does not explain the decline, and it gives no 2026 spending figures for the other three apps. Instacart's third quarter ended on September 30, six days before the two companies signed a confidentiality letter on October 6.

The companies' own accounts measure something broader. Instacart's sales and marketing expense was $242 million in the third quarter, up from $206 million, an increase of about 17%, PPC Land calculates. In the same quarter, DoorDash's sales and marketing expense rose 33% to $765 million, "driven primarily by increases in advertising expenses and personnel-related compensation expenses," though it fell 7% from the second quarter. Those lines include staff costs and, in DoorDash's case, markets outside North America served by Deliveroo and Wolt. Sensor Tower's estimates cover digital advertising in the US and Canada only, and the report does not list the channels it tracks. The two sets of numbers are not directly comparable, but the gap between an estimated 8% fall in Instacart's digital spend and a 17% rise in its reported sales and marketing costs is wide enough to note.

Spending has not bought growth for most

More advertising has not translated into more users for three of the four apps. Where are those users going? In 2026 to date, DoorDash's monthly active users grew 9% year over year, while Uber Eats fell 7%, Instacart 1% and Grubhub 15%, according to Sensor Tower. The firm says the pattern suggests "share loss to DoorDash or other players, such as the mass merchants and Amazon." On the second-largest app, it adds: "As the second largest app in the cohort, weakness at Uber Eats bodes well for DoorDash and suggests share gains."

The quarterly figures fill in the timing. DoorDash grew in every quarter from the start of 2025. Uber Eats has declined in every quarter since the second quarter of 2025, after growing in the first. Grubhub fell in every quarter, by more than 20% in several of them, though its decline narrowed sharply in the fourth quarter to date. Instacart's users grew year over year in every quarter of 2025 and in the first half of 2026, though only marginally in the second quarter, before falling in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter to date, so Sensor Tower's statement that only DoorDash is posting positive quarterly growth holds for the most recent quarters.

App users and orders are different measures, which complicates any reading of Instacart. In the same third quarter in which Sensor Tower estimates its app users fell, Instacart reported orders up 10% to 91.4 million. Instacart's order count includes "those completed through services that are part of the Instacart Enterprise platform, not only those placed on the Instacart Marketplace," which means orders placed on grocers' own branded sites and apps run on Instacart's technology. Those sit outside a count of Instacart app users.

The companies' own audience figures are not built for comparison either. In July, DoorDash cited 42 million monthly active users when it opened a sales channel for Shopify retailers, without saying which countries the figure covers. Uber, in its October advertising research, cited more than 200 million monthly active users across Uber and Uber Eats, a worldwide number that includes ride-hailing.

A rival to Amazon and Walmart, measured without them

Sensor Tower's framing of the deal looks beyond the four apps. According to the report, access to Instacart's more than 2,200 merchants and its share of grocery delivery in the US and Canada would create "a much more formidable competitor to Amazon and Walmart's grocery delivery services." Yet Amazon and Walmart are precisely the companies the cohort leaves out. The 66% download share is a share of delivery specialists' apps. Grocery orders placed through Walmart's or Amazon's own shopping apps are not in the denominator, and Sensor Tower's suggestion that users may be moving to "the mass merchants and Amazon" is an inference from declines elsewhere, not a measured flow.

PPC Land's coverage shows what sits outside the frame. On May 12, 2026, Amazon launched Amazon Now, promising deliveries in about 30 minutes for $3.99 an order for Prime members and $13.99 for other customers, initially across Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Seattle, a quick commerce format that overlaps with the convenience and grocery deliveries DoorDash and Instacart offer. In late August, Amazon said fresh food held six of the top 20 bestseller slots on Amazon.com, with same-day grocery delivery in more than 2,300 US cities and towns, and described itself, without citing a source, as the second-largest grocer in the United States. Walmart, in the quarter to July 31, reported fee-based fast deliveries at a record 37% of store-fulfilled deliveries, with US e-commerce up 24% and Walmart Connect, its US ad business, up 43%.

The distinction is also the one competition authorities will have to draw. If the relevant market is third-party delivery apps, Sensor Tower's estimates put a combined DoorDash and Instacart at about two thirds of new downloads. If it includes retailers' own delivery operations, the share is smaller by an amount the report does not measure. Earlier data drew the same line: when CommerceIQ added DoorDash Ads in June, it cited YipitData research ranking DoorDash as the leading third-party marketplace by US grocery and retail order volume in 2025, while YipitData noted that the category represents only a small fraction of the overall grocery and retail industry.

Buyers and sellers of the same attention

For the advertising market, the report describes companies that sit on both sides of the trade. DoorDash, Instacart and Uber all buy digital media to win users, then sell access to those users to consumer goods brands and restaurants. Instacart's advertising and other revenue rose 23% to $331 million in the third quarter, about 30% of its revenue, by PPC Land's calculation. In June, DoorDash said its ad business served more than 400,000 advertisers across DoorDash, Wolt and Deliveroo. Uber merged its rides and delivery advertising into one self-serve platform, Uber Marketing Manager, the same month.

For a retail media network, the size and activity of the audience is the product being sold. Sensor Tower's estimates suggest that, for the delivery apps, a growing part of that audience is acquired through paid media, most of all at Instacart. Amazon, by comparison, reported advertising revenue of $19.64 billion for the third quarter, up 10.9%, and sells grocery delivery through its main shopping app, the reason Sensor Tower gives for leaving it out of the cohort.

A combined DoorDash and Instacart would bring together the largest and the third-largest app by users, including the one with the highest paid-install rate in the group. Sensor Tower's argument is that scale and brand awareness will matter more as adoption weakens. Whether a merged company would need to spend less to keep its users, or would cross-sell between apps rather than buying new installs, is not something the report attempts to estimate. The companies' announcement did not say how their ad businesses would fit together either.

What the figures do not establish

The estimates are directional by Sensor Tower's own description, and they count apps rather than orders, spending or households. They say nothing about delivery inside Amazon's, Walmart's or Target's shopping apps, and the report offers no data behind its references to customers turning to in-person experiences or to rising acquisition costs.

What the report does show is consistent across its measures: fewer new users arriving, more of them paid for, and DoorDash gaining share of the users who remain, in the year before it agreed to buy the most advertising-reliant of its competitors.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, in a report listing Seema Shah, its VP of Insights, and analysts Abraham Yousef, Kara Lee and Sneha Pandey. The report covers DoorDash, Instacart, Uber Eats and Grubhub, and frames a combined DoorDash and Instacart as a rival to Amazon's and Walmart's grocery delivery services.

What: Estimates showing downloads of the four main US and Canada delivery apps down 21% in 2026 to date, with 25.9% coming from paid sources, up from 21.0% in 2025. A combined DoorDash and Instacart would account for 66% of downloads; Instacart's paid share is 39%. Instacart raised its digital ad spend 56% in 2025 but cut it 8% in the third quarter of 2026. Only DoorDash grew monthly active users in 2026 to date, by 9%.

When: Published October 30, 2026, one day after the October 29 announcement of DoorDash's agreement to buy Instacart for about $17 billion and two days after the merger agreement was signed. The deal is expected to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028.

Where: The United States and Canada. Walmart Grocery, Amazon's Whole Foods delivery and Target's Shipt are excluded from the cohort because they do not run separate delivery apps.

Why: The figures show a delivery app market where new users are scarcer and increasingly bought through advertising, while DoorDash gains share of those who remain. For the marketing community, the same companies are both large buyers of digital media and growing sellers of retail media, and the estimates show how much of the audience they sell to brands is acquired through paid channels. They do not measure Amazon's or Walmart's own delivery, the yardstick against which the deal is being framed.