The Most Popular Smartphone Apps in the World

Applications (or simply, apps) are a major reason why people buy smartphones – it’s also the major reason that distinguishes a cellphone from a smartphone. As of today, there are around a Billion smartphone users in the world – that’s about 1 in every 7 people.

Around 4-5 years ago, all we had on our phone’s was the ability to call, text and play the occasional ‘Snake EX’ game. Now, not only can you access the internet 24×7 using Facebook, Twitter and sharing selfies on Instagram, you can also play a ton of different games, video chat, make presentations/spreadsheets, etc. Most of this is done through apps – the average smartphone user has at least 10 apps installed on his smartphone. I know people who have an app for each alphabet, even though they hardly use half  of them. There are more than 900,000 apps available for the iOS, while Android crossed 1+ million apps in July, 2013. Yet, while so many apps do exist for every smartphone, there’s only a handful that are used by the common folk. I’ve recently come across an infographic that I felt like sharing – it lists down the most popular smartphone apps in the world. The research is done by an online-firm named GlobalWebIndex.

From the researchers – “We’ve identified the apps that are actually used by the 969.49m strong global smartphone population. GlobalWebIndex’s top 10 of actively used smartphone apps [is] based on the % of global smartphone users who have taken advantage of the services they offer in the last month.”

Do note that the infographic doesn’t include any games in the list – if that were the case, I’m sure the likes of Temple Run 2, Subway Surfer, etc. would have made their way into this list as well. In any case, without further ado, here’s the list of the most popular smartphone apps:

16) Vine – This Twitter-owned mobile app enables it’s users to create and post video clips – the interesting part is they have a limitation of only 6 seconds. Vine is a fun app to use and a lot of Vine-videos have gone viral on YouTube – here’s a nice example of the fun things people do with Vine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ2skFke4sI

15) Yelp – The Yelp app is particularly popular in the US – people post reviews of the restaurants or businesses that they’ve been to and helps others get an idea of how good they are.

14) Flickr – Ever since Yahoo! revamped the Flickr app, it’s become really fun to use. Flickr is one of the major photo-sharing sites on the internet. Their recent introduction of a 1 TB account limit for each user really helped people get back to using it.

13) Shazam – Shazam comes quite in handy whenever you’re at a club or a place with some nice music playing and you want to figure out what’s playing. Just run Shazam and it’ll identify the song and give you all the song details (name, artist, album, etc.).

12) FourSquare – the most popular ‘check-in’ application. You can check into places and let your friends know where you’re hanging out or traveling – the app allows you to check-in anywhere and then share your check-in’s on Facebook and Twitter.

11) Ovi Maps – Ovi Maps are basically Nokia maps – it’s a really good utility tool to find directions of a place – especially helps when one’s traveling.

10) Instagram – The highly popular application that allows you to upload photos, add filters to and share them with your friends. I think what sets it apart from any other app is simply that it’s become a social hangout of its own.

9) WhatsApp – The popular messaging app is a very handy-tool that enables users to chat with anyone who’s in your contacts. One of the best chat messaging tools out there.

8) Facebook Messenger – The Facebook Messenger app is frequently used by people to chat with their Facebook friends on their smartphone. It’s simple and easy to use and saves you the trouble of going in the browser to chat with anyone.

7) Skype – The most popular video-chat app – you can have video chats for free from anyone in the world by just adding their Skype ID. Very useful when you want to talk to people who live in another country.

6) Twitter Mobile App – the microblogging site needs no introduction. The Twitter mobile app is used by people around the world – anything from ‘What’s cooking for dinner?’ to ‘The political corruption in the country’ will be tweeted about.

5) WeChat – While it may seem like a surprise entry, WeChat/Weixin is the most used application in China. It has also been introduced in India and is quite well received from the reviews on the app stores. It’s another chat application like WhatsApp that just goes beyond the regular IM chats and provides fun features like recording sounds, video calls, etc.

4) Google+ Mobile App – Honestly, this was a surprise entry. I’m not that familiar with the Google+ mobile app, but I think that all Android users will be using this app on their phones to sign-into their accounts, While the Google+ social network itself might not have gained traction in terms of its popularity, the app manages to do a decent job.

3) YouTube – One cannot question the popularity of Youtube – it’s no surprise that almost everyone uses it frequently. People use the YouTube app to get their daily dose of entertainment on-the-go.

2) Facebook Mobile – I was expecting the Facebook app to be #1, simply because everyone is on Facebook. Still, #2 means it’s no slouch, as statistics show more than half of all smartphone users have the Facebook application installed. The Facebook mobile app provides a clear and nice experience of Facebook on your smartphone.

1) Google Maps – The surprise #1 entry for me. Google Maps is truly a utility tool that is needed for every smartphone. It helps you find directions to the places you want to go and is a life-saver for when you’re traveling to places you don’t know much about. A much-needed app for every smartphone user to have.

That about wraps it up the list – it was quite interesting to see that 3 of the top 4 apps are from Google. How many of these apps do you have downloaded on your smartphone? Which one do you use the most? Let us know in the comments.