Apps for finding black-owned businesses see a spike in downloads

Apps, hashtags, and Google Docs are circulating online to support the black community after the police killing of George Floyd last month. Black-owned business directory apps are particularly popular as protests continue.

A handful of apps that let you search for restaurants, clothing stores, grocery shops, and other black-owned and -operated small businesses saw download numbers soar in the past week. App analytics firm Apptopia crunched the numbers on six of these apps, like EatOkra and Black Nation, and found the numbers from Thursday compared to the Thursday before were in some cases 44 times higher. 

EatOkra went from 157 daily downloads the last Thursday of May to 7,145 on Thursday — a 4,450 percent increase. Black Nation, an app for black entrepreneurs to list their business, jumped 49 times in downloads in a week to over 5,720 from just over 100 daily downloads. Other similar, smaller apps like Black Wallet and BlackGuide saw increases but downloads were still under 1,000 a day. Census data from 2015 shows only 2.6 million black-owned businesses throughout the U.S. 

The hashtag #blackownedbusiness is also getting a lot of traction as protesters use social media platforms to spread supportive messaging. Google Docs, like this one tweeted out from San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho, are slow to load on Saturday because of heavy traffic.

Even Uber Eats is helping highlight minority-owned businesses. On the food delivery app you can now find black-owned restaurants and then order with no delivery fees through the end of 2020, as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced on Friday.

Yelp will also soon be adding search filter to help users find black-owned businesses, citing a 25-times increase in searches.