In the 6 months following World Phone initial 2015 release, it garnered over 1.5 million downloads across iOS and Android, as stated in the 3rd December, 2015 announcement. However, Android had been out only two weeks prior to this announcement, and had 350k downloads in those two weeks.
The play store lists it as 1 million downloads currently, however, the next increment is 5 million downloads and I'd say we're probably actually sitting around 3 million downloads, but the counter is showing 1 mil until we surpass 5 million.
Regardless, World Phone is a niche product in a lot of cases, and with the need for internet to transmit the calls, and the high cost of cellular data, I'd say it wasn't a very consumer-friendly application. If I'm going to use my cellular to transmit over World Phone, might as well use Facebook or just use my phone for calls. So these were strong downloads for an application that I don't see would have been super useful in 2015.
With World Wifi available, now World Phone becomes decent again, if there's no cost to the wifi needed for World Phone phone calls, and the calls themselves are 10c a minute or whatever, then this becomes a solid option again.
On top of the uses for World Phone, people just like having wifi for their Social media etc. So an app that lets you bypass the Starbucks or Maccas logins and finds Wifi near you, should be killer.
Depending on the media attention and the word-of-mouth, if the 16-35 year old demographic discover this app, it could reach 1 million iOS downloads within the next month. Add the Android demographic and World Wifi could have a combined number of downloads of 5 million or so by March.
However, it is free to find wifi using the app and to connect I believe. The subscription is only needed for auto-connecting and the VPN. I would certainly pay for the VPN, but of the 5 million predicted downloads. Only say 100k will pay the subscription. So that's still 400k revenue.
Not bad for consumer revenue when the company is focusing more on SaaS Business-2-Business rather than consumers.
Those are all just estimates, but for comparison, WiFi Map on Android has approx 10+ million downloads. I'm sure that'd be matched by at least 10 million downloads on iOS. So there's 20 million downloads for an app that simply offers users the ability to share passwords and locations with each other for Wifi. No autoconnect, no AR (although, I think this is gimmicky, doesn't even let me do it on my friends iPhone 6s) and no VPN built in.
So NOR could be looking at 10+ million downloads by July, potentially. With even 10% (1mil) paying a $4 subscription, that's some seriously decent revenue coming from every day users.
All IMO and simply guessing.
NOR Price at posting:
2.2¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
