Lyft is quickly catching up to Uber in an important way

It's no secret that Uber is the most popular ride-hailing app. But Lyft is catching up ... at least in the U.S.

Uber is in 60 countries, while the smaller Lyft is only available in the U.S. and Canada. Uber's revenue, number of riders and drivers, and downloads always tower over little Lyft — but Uber's losses are also bigger: $837 million versus Lyft's $280 million. And now, Lyft's on the path to catch up to the ride-hailing giant in a major way: its number of daily active users in the U.S.

Daily active users, or DAU, are the number of people who use an app over the course of any given day. App analytics firm Apptopia looked into the rival ride-hailing apps' average monthly DAU. Its analysis found that from January 2018 through January 2020, Lyft's DAU rate grew more than 75 percent, while Uber lagged behind at just under 50 percent.

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Both are inching closer to 2.6 million daily active users, but Lyft's getting there faster.

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Both apps were downloaded more than 2 million times each month. But 30 days after downloading the apps, more people were still using Lyft (18 percent) than Uber (10 percent).

Based on this trend, Apptopia forecasts that Lyft's U.S. DAU rate will pass Uber's by the end of 2020.