Subway Surfers is the first game to hit 1 billion downloads on the Play Store

By Joe Maring
published

Endless running games are a dime-a-dozen nowadays, but one of the oldest and most iconic is Subway Surfers. Subway Surfers was first released on the Google Play Store in May of 2012, and on March 15, 2018, developers SYBO and Kiloo announced that it's the first game to cross 1 billion downloads on the Play Store.

Per Jacob Møller, CEO of Killo –

We are thrilled to be the biggest game in the world on the Google Play platform. Surpassing 1 billion downloads is a historic accomplishment. In this case, history was written by a talented team of developers and a fantastic collaboration between SYBO and Killo.

Over the past few years, Subway Surfers has seen enormous growth. Looking at Google Play and iOS downloads combined, the game was downloaded 350 million times in 2015, another 330 million downloads came in 2016, and 2017 saw a whopping 400 million downloads – making it the biggest mobile game of last year.

I've run across Subway Surfers a few times while browsing through the Play Store, but I personally never realized just how popular it was. SYBO and Kiloo note that the game still has 20 million daily players, and looking at last years numbers, it doesn't seem like the Subway Surfers hype will be dying anytime soon.

Download: Subway Surfers (free) (opens in new tab)

Joe Maring
Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.

9 Comments
  • Just say no. While the game is simple, and very adictive..... unless you have the ability to root/unlock your device....when you need to switch devices (damage, loss, etc.) you loose all progress and have to start over. Sure it integrates with your FB login, but unless many other games (even Pokemon Go), there is no saving/synchronizing data across devices.
  • This is exactly why I stopped playing it, the fact that you can't save and transfer to other devices is absurd
  • And still they don't add cloud saves..........
    I stopped playing it because of that.
  • A billion download is awesome, but only 2% of those downloads play regularly. They have as many daily players as Pokemon Go, and people say PoGo is dead.
  • Welp, still play it from time to time. Good time waster. Nothing spectacular but decent enough. Don't really care about cloud save since all it needs to do for me is to entertain me for a few minutes.
  • Tried it a few years ago and didn't care for it.
  • I can't believe games on Android don't have cloud saves like on the dreaded iPhone with iCloud, I hate to say it but Apple got that aspect right and Google needs to step up there with Android, still congrats to Subway Surfers on reaching 1 billion downloads on the Play Store
  • Is it available on PS4?
  • Stopped playing because no cloud syncing. And they really haven't updated the game play.