Downloads of the four US rideshare apps tracked by Sensor Tower fell 20% year over year in the first nine months of 2026, and nearly one in four of the downloads that did happen came through paid advertising, according to estimates the market intelligence firm published today. The paid share rose to 24% from 15% a year earlier. Digital ad spend by Uber, Lyft and Waymo grew 8% over the same period, after an 87% jump in 2025, yet the number of people using the apps each month fell 4%. In Canada, the same report shows Bolt-owned Hopp losing two thirds of its downloads after its owner cut advertising by 39%, while Lyft took 52% of the market's rideshare ad spend.

In Short

Fewer people in the US downloaded ride apps such as Uber and Lyft this year, and a growing share of the people who did arrived through an ad, according to Sensor Tower's estimates. The companies kept raising their ad budgets without gaining many new riders, which Sensor Tower puts down to riders switching freely between apps and following discounts. In Canada, the report shows what happens when the spending stops: Hopp cut back and its downloads collapsed, while Lyft spent more and grew.

What Sensor Tower measured

The report, titled "Scale Drives Market Growth, As New Rideshare Apps Boom," covers rideshare apps in the United States and Canada and food and grocery delivery apps across both countries. Its year-to-date period runs from the first through the third quarter of 2026, January to September, and its growth rates compare that period with the same months of 2025.

Sensor Tower uses different groups of apps for different measures, and the figures read differently depending on which group sits behind them. The US advertising figures cover three advertisers: Lyft (the Lyft and Ride with Lyft entities), Uber (Ride with Uber, Uber Carshare, Uber for Business, Uber One and Uber Technologies) and Waymo. The US download and user figures add a fourth app, Empower, to those three. In Canada, the app cohort is Uber, Lyft, Hopp and Uride, while the advertising figures name Bolt, Hopp's parent company, rather than Hopp itself.

The numbers are modelled. "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." Apart from one quarter of Canadian download counts, the report gives shares and growth rates rather than absolute numbers of downloads, users or dollars.

Seema Shah, Sensor Tower's VP of Insights, summarised the US findings: "Uber's scale keeps it on top in the US, where rising ad spend has done little to boost adoption or shift market share. With no switching costs and usage largely driven by promotions, retaining riders will remain costly across the market." Shah and analysts Abraham Yousef, Kara Lee and Sneha Pandey are listed as the report's contacts.

The rideshare figures arrive four days after Sensor Tower's report on delivery apps, in which downloads of DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart and Grubhub fell 21% in 2026 to date. Much of that delivery data reappears here, alongside new quarterly figures.

More advertising, fewer downloads

The US spending curve has flattened sharply. After rising 87% year over year in 2025, digital ad spend by the three US advertisers grew 8% in the first nine months of 2026, according to Sensor Tower's estimates. The report does not say which channels the estimates cover, or how the spending splits between rider acquisition, driver recruitment and brand campaigns.

What the money bought is less clear. "Still, despite this overall increase in ad spend, there has been limited positive impact on customer adoption and engagement, highlighting the competitiveness of the market, the lack of switching costs and the dependency on promotions and discounts to drive usage," the report says.

Downloads across the four US apps fell 20% year over year in 2026 to date, and monthly active users fell 4%. The exception was Empower, whose downloads rose 204%. Sensor Tower's reading: "this suggests saturation in the market." Because Empower grew while the four-app total fell by a fifth, the combined decline for Uber, Lyft and Waymo must have been steeper than 20%. The report does not give that figure, nor Empower's share of the cohort, so the size of Empower's gain in absolute downloads is unknown.

Set side by side, the two headline growth rates imply that the three advertisers spent about 35% more per download than a year earlier, by PPC Land's arithmetic: 8% more money spread across 20% fewer downloads. That figure is rough. The spend and download cohorts are not identical, and the download total includes Empower, whose advertising is not measured. Measured against paid downloads alone, the same arithmetic points the other way, with spend per paid download down by about 16%, which would mean either that installs became cheaper to buy or that much of the measured spend goes to advertising other than install campaigns. The report does not separate the two.

One download in four is paid for

Paid sources accounted for 24% of downloads in 2026 to date, up from 15% the prior year, according to Sensor Tower. Lyft and Waymo lean on them most: 37% of Lyft's US downloads and 30% of Waymo's came from paid sources. The report does not give Uber's or Empower's figure, but for the cohort to average 24% while Lyft and Waymo sit above it, the remaining two must sit below it.

The shift in mix is larger than the headline share suggests. If the cohort's downloads fell 20% while the paid share rose from 15% to 24%, paid downloads grew by roughly 28% and organic downloads fell by roughly 28%, by PPC Land's calculation on Sensor Tower's rounded figures. The rounding leaves a range: paid downloads up somewhere between about 20% and 36%, organic downloads down between about 27% and 30%. On any reading within that range, the fall in downloads is a fall in people finding and installing the apps unprompted, partly offset by installs the companies paid to acquire.

The report does not define "paid sources." App marketers usually count paid installs through a mobile measurement partner, an independent company that decides which ad, if any, gets credit for an install. Sensor Tower's numbers come from its own panel and models, and the companies' own attributed figures may differ.

Riders who come back, riders who leave

Sensor Tower attaches two engagement measures to its US findings. Resurrected users, defined as "users who open the app in the period, after not opening the app in the prior period," accounted for 32% of users of Uber, Lyft and Waymo in 2026 to date. The churn rate was 47%. Sensor Tower describes the resurrected share as a "spike" but gives no prior-year figure for either measure, and it does not say how churn is calculated or over which interval.

Taken at face value, and assuming both measures use the same periods, the pair describes a user base that turns over heavily: close to a third of active users in a period had been absent in the previous one, while a churn rate near half points to a similar scale of departures. That pattern is consistent with the report's argument about switching costs, though the report does not track riders moving between specific apps.

Canada: what happened when Hopp stopped spending

Canada provides the report's clearest test of what advertising does in this category, because one company spent heavily and then pulled back.

Hopp, which Sensor Tower identifies as owned by Bolt, had what the report calls "a stellar start" in 2025. In the second quarter of that year, Hopp's 401,000 downloads in Canada beat Lyft's 297,000, the only absolute download counts in the report. In 2026, Bolt cut its Canadian ad spend 39% year over year across the first nine months. Hopp's downloads fell 67% in that period and 73% in the third quarter alone. "This underscores how dependent Bolt (Hopp) was on ad spending to drive app adoption and usage for Hopp," the report says.

Lyft moved into the gap. Its share of rideshare ad spend in Canada reached 52% in the first nine months of 2026, up 20 percentage points, ahead of Uber at 36% and Bolt at 11%. Measured by spend, Lyft now holds a majority share of voice in Canadian rideshare. Its downloads in Canada rose 28% and its monthly active users rose 51%. At 35%, up 6 points, Lyft also had the highest share of downloads from paid sources in Canada, while Uber had the lowest, at 11%, "reinforcing Lyft's reliance on advertising to drive user acquisition," according to the report. Sensor Tower's interpretation: "This suggests that Lyft likely geared up promotions and ad campaigns to acquire users in the wake of Hopp's collapse."

Two of the report's Lyft figures do not match. In one passage, Lyft's Canadian downloads rose 24% in 2026 to date; in another, covering the same January to September period, they rose 28%. The report does not explain the difference.

The quarterly data suggests Lyft's gains came early in the year. In the third quarter, Lyft's downloads grew only 4%, behind Uride at 60% and ahead of Uber at 1%. For downloads to rise 24% or 28% across nine months with 4% growth in the last three, growth in the first half must have been considerably higher.

Uber's share slips, its loyalty holds

Uber remains the largest app in Canada by a wide margin. It held 68% of monthly active users in the cohort in the third quarter of 2026, followed by Lyft at 26%, Hopp at 5% and Uride at 1%. In the third quarter of 2023, Uber's share was 84%, "demonstrating how its hold on the market is slipping," according to Sensor Tower.

Its users are the most frequent, though. In the third quarter, 14% of Uber's monthly users in Canada opened the app daily, against a cohort average of 12%. Hopp's ratio of daily to monthly users fell 5 points year over year, while every other app's rose. "This indicates that users are increasingly neglecting to open the app on a regular basis," the report says, adding that Hopp may be dropping out of the routine of comparing prices across apps before booking. "This may also suggest that Hopp is losing interest among commuters who ostensibly use rideshare platforms more frequently than typical consumers."

The report opens by stating that "Uber's acquisitions and scale have enabled market share growth internationally, while maintaining its lead in the US." It names no acquisitions and contains no international data beyond Canada, where Uber's user share fell 16 points in three years. Its title points to "new rideshare apps" booming. The growth figures behind that are Empower's 204% in the US and Uride's 60% in Canada, both from bases the report does not disclose, while Hopp, the breakout app of 2025 in Canada, collapsed.

Delivery apps: the same squeeze

The delivery section repeats the main findings of Sensor Tower's October 30 report. Combined with Instacart, which DoorDash agreed to buy for about $17 billion on October 29, DoorDash would have 66% of downloads across the US and Canada delivery cohort in 2026 to date, against 26% for Uber Eats and 8% for Grubhub. Cohort downloads fell 21% in 2026 to date and 1% in 2025, and growth has been negative every year since 2020. Paid sources accounted for 26% of downloads in 2026 to date, up from 21% in 2025. The cohort excludes Walmart Grocery, Amazon's Whole Foods delivery and Target's Shipt, which do not run separate delivery apps.

Some figures are new. In the third quarter of 2026, the cohort's monthly active users rose 3% year over year, led by a 12% gain at DoorDash, while the other three apps declined. Over the first nine months, DoorDash's users grew 9%, while Uber Eats' fell 7%, Instacart's 1% and Grubhub's 15%. "As the second largest app in the cohort, weakness at Uber Eats bodes well for DoorDash and suggests share gains," the report says. DoorDash's own accounts point the same way on spending: its sales and marketing expense rose 33% to $765 million in the third quarter, driven primarily by advertising and personnel costs.

Engagement among remaining users rose. Users averaged 11 sessions per week in 2026 to date, up from 10 in 2025, an increase Sensor Tower puts at 8%; the rounded figures would suggest 10%. The firm cautions that the growth is "amongst the most loyal users and likely doesn't offset the issue with driving new customer adoption."

For Uber, the two halves of the report pull in different directions. Its ride app keeps the US lead and the most loyal users in Canada, while Uber Eats lost 7% of its monthly users and holds a download share less than half that of a combined DoorDash and Instacart.

Why the paid share matters for advertisers

Rideshare and delivery companies sit on both sides of the advertising market. As buyers, they pay ad platforms for installs, and roughly a quarter of downloads in both categories now come from paid sources, by Sensor Tower's estimates. That fits a wider rise in mobile media spending. On October 28, AppsFlyer reported that ad spend rose on nine of the ten largest mobile media sources in its 2026 index, which it attributed to more attributed conversions and higher media costs. In shopping apps, Adjust put the US cost of an install at $3.28 in the first half of 2026, up 22%, with the global ratio of paid to organic installs up 26% to 0.72.

As sellers, the same companies market their riders and eaters to brands. On June 22, 2026, Uber launched Uber Marketing Manager, a single self-serve platform for ads across the rides app and Uber Eats. In October, TripleLift became Uber Advertising's first US partner for selling Uber audiences outside Uber's apps, through private marketplace deals on open-web display, native and video inventory. Uber's own materials cite more than 200 million monthly active users across Uber and Uber Eats, a global figure with no US breakdown, and the company had publicly targeted $1 billion in annual advertising revenue. Lyft, for its part, opened programmatic buying of its in-app ads through Microsoft Monetize in October 2025 and began extending rider audiences to connected TV and online video.

That dual role gives the paid share a second meaning. The audiences Uber and Lyft package for brands, increasingly sold offsite as well as in-app, are partly audiences they bought: more than a third of Lyft's US downloads this year came from paid sources, by Sensor Tower's estimate. The promotions the report identifies as the main driver of usage are also becoming an ad product. On June 15, 2026, Uber Advertising added Offers on Uber, formats in which brands attach a sponsored ride incentive to a message on the home screen or pair their messaging with a consumer benefit during the trip. The report does not say whether brand-funded incentives figure in the promotions it describes.

Waymo's place in the figures shows autonomous rides competing for the same users with the same tools. Its 30% paid share is the second highest in the US cohort. On October 28, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said Waymo operates in 15 major US cities, has opened service to the public in San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa, and plans to expand into Canada, Germany, Singapore and Spain. Waymo is not part of Sensor Tower's Canadian cohort, and the report does not break down Waymo's US figures by city, so it cannot show whether its paid downloads are concentrated in newly opened markets.

What the figures do not establish

The report shows advertising rising and downloads falling in the US, but not what downloads would have done without the extra spend. The Canadian case, where a 39% cut in Bolt's spending coincided with a 67% fall in Hopp's downloads, is a strong correlation over nine months rather than a controlled test.

The report gives no dollar figures for ad spend, no absolute download or user counts outside one quarter in Canada, no prior-year comparison for resurrection and churn, and no channel breakdown. It does not define paid sources. Two of its figures for Lyft's Canadian download growth disagree. And the opening claim about Uber's international share growth rests on no data in the report beyond Canada, where the trend runs the other way.

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 Uber, Lyft, Waymo and Empower in the US; Uber, Lyft, Bolt-owned Hopp and Uride in Canada; and DoorDash, Instacart, Uber Eats and Grubhub in delivery.

What: Estimates showing US rideshare app downloads down 20% and monthly active users down 4% in the first nine months of 2026, with 24% of downloads from paid sources, up from 15%. Ad spend by Uber, Lyft and Waymo rose 8% after an 87% jump in 2025. In Canada, Bolt cut spending 39% and Hopp's downloads fell 67%, while Lyft took 52% of ad spend and grew its users 51%. Uber's Canadian user share fell to 68% from 84% in the third quarter of 2023.

When: Published today, covering January to September 2026 against the same months of 2025, four days after Sensor Tower's October 30 delivery app report.

Where: The United States and Canada.

Why: The figures describe a category where new riders are scarcer and a growing share is bought through advertising, while extra spending has done little to move share in the US. For marketers, the same companies are large buyers of mobile ads and growing sellers of ad inventory built on the riders they acquire, and Canada shows how quickly an app's adoption can fall once paid acquisition stops.