Our increasing obsession with Internet shopping has catalysed a parallel obsession with tracking our orders, according to analysis of delivery-app usage by Apptopia.

Apptopia’s research indicates that the end-of-year holiday season saw a significant uptick in the daily use of delivery-tracking apps, fueled in large part by a dramatic rise in downloads of Shopify’s all-platform tracker, Arrive.

In December 2019, Arrive was downloaded some 2.7 million times - 1 million more than the combined downloads of tracking apps from UPS, DHL, FedEx and the US Postal Service.

Initial results from April 2020 suggest that pandemic lockdowns have only increased our fascination with tracking the whereabouts of our online orders.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ben Schott is a Bloomberg Opinion visual columnist. He created the Schott’s Original Miscellany and Schott’s Almanac series, and writes for newspapers and magazines around the world.

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