Many theories are being thrown around, but the trend in the headline does not seem suspicious or surprising at all even though it's a country often associated with fraud. I grew up in Nigeria and personally know plenty of Nigerians who regularly travel back and forth between London and U.S. cities where Uber operates, plus it's the most populous country in Africa so if even a tiny fraction of the country is traveling abroad, that would be a large number of people and probably a large percentage of downloads in a category (Travel) which the rest of the population doesn't use as much.

Stephen -- really good points. I think the breadth of the countries is still surprising / bizarre. While Nigeria does sound plausible based on your comment, others like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Barbados, etc do not have the same characteristics and so def a bit stranger.

Thoughts?

If iOS users tend to be a small affluent subset of the population of small developing countries such as Mongolia, then they're more likely to be travelers and downloading apps needed in other countries, right? If the total number of downloads of all apps is pretty small in those countries, then it's no big deal to make it into the top 1000, because it might just mean there were a few dozen downloads of your app.

Great point. Lyft may still be the surprise in this. Affluent Mongolians are unlikely to be traveling and looking for a way to share rides with strangers, no? Possible perhaps but sounds much less likely.

It might be visitors from those countries downloading the app via their respective carrier's app "storefront" while visiting a city where the services are offered/operating.

That's possible, but I do think there are enough travelers in these countries to account for a lot of the "surprises" they're finding.

I think only people with a nigerian iTunes account (and therefore a nigerian credit card) are able to download from the nigerian app store.

Hey guys - Farhan from CB Insights here. We're collecting and analyzing a ton of mobile data (50GB a day, 650M+ rows so far!) and are trying to surface interesting publishers and trends.

If you have any questions about the analysis or have any topics you'd like us to look at, let me know. We're always looking for ways to slice and dice this data set. I'm at fahmed at cbinsights.com.

Perhaps the App Store should provide an option to the developers to hide the app from the listing pages based on a negative list of countries?

Buy installs.

This is exactly what it is.

without knowing how the country is determined, how can you be exactly sure what it is? maybe many wealthy nigerians are in new york and have uber installed?

Exactly. A large number of Nigerians travel to London, NYC, DC, etc, and I imagine travelers account for a lot of the other countries' stats as well.