Whether you want to take a selfie for the ’Gram, tweet your thoughts, or keep your favorite music at your fingertips, celebrate the marvelous world of apps on National App Day on December 11.
Not only do apps make life easier, but they have also created a huge number of employment opportunities for developers, social media warriors, and of course, influencers.
- 1980s – Psion — a London-based company, launched the Psion Organiser, widely considered to be the first established PDA device. The functions of the Organiser weren’t much, but it did come with features like a calculator, text editor, agenda, and contacts. This set a precedent for future mobile app developments.
- 1983 – Steve Jobs first came up with the idea of an ‘App Store’
- 1997 – Nokia launched its 6110 mobile phone, featuring what many consider to be the first mobile app — the arcade game “Snake”.
- 2007 – Apps became popular with the release of Apple’s iPhone.
- 2008 – Apple introduced OS 2.0, which included approximately 500 apps and allowed third-party app generation.
- 2008 – Google Play was initially launched in October 2008 under the name Android Market.
- 2010 – The word “App” was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
- 2017 – The number of apps in the Play Store is 2.2 million.
- 2017 – Christopher John (C.J.) Thompson, founder of Platinum Edge Media, established this holiday in 2017. He wanted to acknowledge the critical role apps play in modern life, from simplifying tasks to enhancing entertainment and communication.
- 2019 – Users downloaded a whopping 204 billion apps.
- 2021 – the top-grossing Android apps worldwide are dominated by mobile games, with Coin Master, Garena Free Fire, and PUBG mobile leading the ranking. This hardly comes as a surprise as it is estimated that gaming apps will account for over 70 percent of Google Play app revenues in 2024.
- 2024 – The number of apps in the Apple store drops to 1.54 million. The number of apps is 1.68 million.
- 2025 – Most popular apps key statistics:
- TikTok was the most downloaded app globally in 2024, with 773 million downloads
- Roblox was the most downloaded game in 2024, with 205 million downloads
- Temu was the most downloaded app in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy in 2024
- Four of the ten most downloaded apps of 2023 were published by Meta
- App is short for Software Application; apps quickly emerged as our mobile devices adopted innovative technologies.
- Facebook reigns as the most downloaded app of all time.
- For the past several years, Facebook has had the most popular apps both by daily downloads (Facebook Messenger) and daily active users (WhatsApp), as well as 3 of the other top 5 most popular apps. But now, TikTok is the most downloaded app in the world, with over 176 million downloads in Q1 2022 alone and over 1 billion monthly active users.
- On the Apple App Store, over 60% of apps have never been downloaded.
- Users are spending almost 90% of their time in apps, not browsing the internet.
- The average user has more than 80 apps on their phone. But they use just 9 per day and 30 per month on average.
- A recent study showed that people prefer apps over websites.
- Mobile games account for over 40% of smartphone users, with ~80% of them using Android.
- As of July 2022, Android users can choose from over 3.57 million apps, while Apple/iOS users can choose from just 1.85 million apps.
- Over 100,000 apps are released monthly between the two major app stores, with the Google Play Store adding about 70,000 per month and the Apple App Store adding just over 30,000 per month for iOS users. That’s over 3,000 apps per day!
- Android controls the mobile OS market with a 73% market share. Combined with Apple’s iOS, the two control 99% of the global market share.
- Nearly 80% of users never use an app again after 72 hours of installation.
- Games saw fewer downloads overall in 2023, with the industry struggling to reach the heights of the pandemic. No game made it into the top 10 most downloaded this year, with Subway Surfers and Stumble Guys falling out the chart.
- TikTok reclaimed the title of most installed app in 2024, surpassing Instagram which had snatched the crown in 2023.
App Downloads (mm) TikTok 773 Instagram 759 Facebook 571 WhatsApp 527 Temu 438 Telegram 409 CapCut 361 Threads 322 Snapchat 302 ChatGPT 278 WhatsApp Buiness 271 Messenger 265 Spotify 239 Shein 211 Sources: App Data Report, Appfigures, AppMagic
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