A week after its May 27 launch, the HBO Max app ranked as No. 1 in the Apple TV App Store, according to research company App Annie.

Simultaneously, some pundits were knocking HBO Max’s performance in the mobile realm, with Sensor Tower reporting only 87,000 first-day downloads for the HBO Max app on iOS and Android.

Does that mean the new AT&T and WarnerMedia streaming service is a dud? Is it a hit? That’s real tough to say.

Given the complicated engineering of HBO Max distribution, it’s difficult to get a clear picture of the platform’s early performance. The typical comparison model — the Nov. 12 mega-successful launch of Disney Plus — is hardly applicable.

While The Walt Disney Co. rocked the media technology world by revealing that its brand new direct-to-consumer streaming service signed up 10 million paid users on its first day in the North American market, it’s unlikely WarnerMedia will be able to tout a similarly clean, simple tour de force benchmark.

For Disney Plus, every new app download could be tied to a new customer: There was no overplayed legacy “Disney Now” service to cloud the benchmarks. And Disney Plus distribution was primarily direct to consumer, occurring in widely visible OTT and mobile platforms, not diffused into proprietary pay TV systems.

Because HBO Max is overlaying the legacy HBO Now and HBO Go apps, things are confusing.

For example, the Sensor Tower mobile app figure is somewhat misleading. It doesn’t include Max updates to WarnerMedia’s legacy HBO apps. HBO Now has infiltrated millions of smartphones since launching back in 2015, and was averaging around 16,000 app downloads per day before the launch of Max. Another way to look at it: the launch of HBO Max spiked daily WarnerMedia OTT app installs by 71,000 downloads.

In the connected TV realm, HBO Max measurement is even more shrouded.

Start with the fact that WarnerMedia has not been able to strike agreements to include HBO Max in the top two OTT device ecosystems, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.

The high ranking on Apple TV— one of the bigger OTT device ecosystems — does indicate high living-room demand for the $14.99-a-month WarnerMedia subscription video service.

Much of HBO Max’s distribution is tied to linear pay TV services, with a WarnerMedia spokesperson telling Yahoo Finance, “HBO subscribers of our distribution partners—Comcast, Charter, Cox, Altice, Verizon and others all had immediate access to HBO Max on the day of launch.”

Indeed, with the HBO Max natively integrated into the proprietary video systems of these operators that don’t use off-the-shelf OTT devices, such as Altice One, it’s hard to get a clear picture as to how many pay TV users are accessing the service in these early days.

“This is a unique platform in many ways, including the way it is distributed,” recently appointed WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said in a statement. 

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile-first streaming platform Quibi drew 300,000 app downloads on its launch day Monday, according to mobile market research company Sensor Tower.

That preliminary total accounts for only about 7.5% of the 4 million downloads Disney Plus drew during its first day in the North American market back on Nov. 12.

For his part, however, founder Katzenberg, a former Disney mogul, has been for some time discounting the notion that Quibi and Disney Plus were even comparable. For one, Quibi is a brand-new programming brand, focused on adult audiences using only mobile devices.

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“I don’t think we’ll be rocket ship like Disney Plus,” Katzenberg told Next TV in an interview conducted in March. “With Disney, you’re talking about one of the greatest brands and IP ever built under one roof. That’s an amazing thing to admire, but that won’t happen to Quibi.”

And notably, Quibi is the No. 1 app in Apple’s App Store.

Also read: Katzenberg on Quibi: 'If You Make It and It's Good, They Will Come'

While not a ton can be gleaned from the first-day app download total, the market reception through social media and the press can’t be described as necessarily boffo. On Monday, some of the earliest adopters took to Twitter and complained that they couldn’t port Quibi to their TVs. (Not only is there no Quibi app for Roku, Fire TV or any other OTT device, there’s no support for Chromecast or AirPlay.)

Meanwhile, reviews of the platform haven’t been strong, starting with the tech press: “There’s a frivolousness to Quibi that none of its programming can seem to shake because the platform was built for frivolity,” said The Verge writer Joshua Rivera in a review headlined “Quibi’s Shows Are Fun, Familiar and Forgettable.”

“I could put on a Quibi show and keep up with it just fine while writing a grocery list, chopping garlic, or brushing my teeth and only glancing at it. Once, I almost put on a Quibi show while watching something else on my TV,” Rivera wrote.

Notably, our favorite tech blog review headline comes from a Mean Girls-inspired scribe at Engadget: “Quit Trying to Make Quibi Happen,” reads the header from that tech site’s review.

Reception hasn’t been much better among cultural elite: “After spending a day or so sampling what’s going to be on offer when the service goes live on April 6, I’m not feeling very heartened about Quibi’s possibility,” noted Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. "What I’ve seen so far feels, for the most part, devoid of any real raison d’être. It’s a rambling assemblage of mere stuff, plain-looking and arbitrary. There is no big, grabbing Why that emerges when surveying the first salvo of Quibi content; it’s all just sort of there, broken up into awkward chunks and flitting quickly out of mind once you’ve moved on to the next equally forgettable thing.”

And things don’t improve much in the more mainstream press. “Is new short-form streaming service Quibi worth it? Short answer: No,” reads the headline for USA Today writer Kelly Lawler’s review.

Quibi debuted Monday with a collection of 50 original series, cut up into episodes of 10 minutes or less, most of the shows produced by well-known Hollywood talent. Subscriptions to the service run $4.99 for a version with limited commercials and $7.99 for an ad-free version.

Squeezed among a flurry of new streaming platforms that have recently launched (Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus) or are about to debut (Comcast’s Peacock and AT&T’s HBO Max), Quibi is attracting a lot of intrigue in the media tech business.

For one, unlike the other ventures, which are backed by conglomerates, Quibi (short for “quick bites”) is a well-backed start-up, financed with $1.75 billion in venture capital, and overseen by former Disney and DreamWorks mogul Katzenberg, as well as CEO Meg Whitman, a longtime tech world celebrity exec.

Perhaps more than anything, Quibi is trying to disprove the notion—fomented strongly by Verizon’s expensive Go90 venture—that a mobile-first video programming initiative can’t work.