The Ten Most Popular Apps In the US

Eight of the top ten are owned by Google or Facebook. All are free. Is there a message for marketers there? JL

Dan Frommer reports in Re/code:

Between smartphones and tablets, Americans spend more than half of their digital media consumption time — 57% — in apps. The big winners are Facebook and Google, which own eight of the top 10 apps. The only non-Google and non-Facebook apps in the top 10 are Snapchat (tied for No. 6 with 50% penetration) and Pandora (No. 10, 41% penetration). All of these apps are free to use.

Between smartphones and tablets, Americans spend more than half of their digital media consumption time — 57 percent — in apps, according to comScore’s annual U.S. mobile apps report. That’s about the same as a year ago — evidence that the dramatic shift to mobile has now leveled out in the U.S.

These are the winners, according to comScore, as measured by their penetration of the U.S. mobile app audience:

comScore

The big winners — surprise, surprise — are Facebook and Google, which own eight of the top 10 apps.

• Facebook took the No. 1 slot with its main Facebook app, which has 81 percent penetration of the app audience, is the top app for all age groups except 18- to 24-year-olds, and is the most likely app to be on a smartphone user’s homescreen (46 percent of homescreens). It also took No. 3 for Facebook Messenger and No. 6 for Instagram, which is tied with Snapchat at 50 percent penetration.
• Google’s top app is YouTube, which is the No. 2 app overall and the No. 1 app for 18- to 24-year-olds. It also publishes Google Search (No. 4), Google Maps (No. 5), Google Play (No. 8) and Gmail (No. 9).
• The only non-Google and non-Facebook apps in the top 10 are Snapchat (tied for No. 6 with 50 percent penetration) and Pandora (No. 10, 41 percent penetration).
• Now that Snap has gone public, all of the top 10 U.S. apps are owned by public companies based in California.
• All of these apps are free to use — which is a big factor in their popularity — and most serve advertisements. But YouTube and Pandora now both offer subscription services, and Google Play is largely an app and media store.

Not much changed year over year in the composition of this list — evidence that the biggest winners tend to stay the biggest winners.