Is Saturn a Cooler Version of Blackboard?

Ariel Ariel
Aug. 11

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Back to School. Check out the full article for more insights.


It's back-to-school season, and the App Store is a buzz with school-related apps. Remind and ParentSquare, communication apps for parents, are now ranked #20 and #38 overall in the App Store above popular apps like Snapchat and Pinterest.

There's one more app that's sitting high right now thanks to B2S season - Saturn.

Unlike the others though, Saturn is an app for students and not parents. Saturn offers a way to manage schedules and socialize, a killer combo if you ask me.

Saturn launched back in 2019 but hasn't seen much tractions until last summer. According to our estimates, Saturn saw 52K downloads in 2019 and 68K downloads in 2020. Downloads nearly tripled in 2021 to 169K and then exploded in 2022 to 950K.

The increase might be related to Saturn taking Nikita Bier, the guy behind Gas, as a consultant.

Last week, Saturn rose to (almost) the top of the US App Store, placing 5th overall, where it still sits right now.

I think combining useful features with easy communication into an app that doesn't look like old enterprise software is a win, which means more growth for Saturn.

But it does have a problem - it's an iOS-only app at the moment. For a brand new app that might work but for an app released four years ago, I see it being the difference between making it to #1 and not.

We're still early in the season though, so things may change.

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