Since apps were born in the 90s of the 20th century, their evolution has been enormous, a growth of a magnitude hardly imaginable when Tetris -by the way, the best-selling video game in history– was installed on a Danish phone in 1994, which is considered to be the first application.
Numerous types of apps have blossomed over the decades, used continuously for all aspects of our daily lives, from sharing payments to managing travel to meeting people to ordering food.
To provide some context on the scale of apps, we could add some annual data – for 2023 – on global app usage.
According to data from the Digital 2024 study, in the whole of 2023 no less than 257 billion downloads were accumulated across the planet, an increase of 2.1 billion over the previous year, an increase of 0.9%.
The same study shows that app spending during that time period was USD 171.3 billion, an increase of 2.7% over the previous year. That’s $4.4 billion more.
It may not be bold to say that we now have apps for everything we need in our daily lives, but which mobile apps are the most popular in the world? Let’s see which are the most downloaded and the ones with the longest usage time.
World’s most downloaded apps
Social networks, which also date back to the 1990s, monopolise the top positions of the most downloaded apps in the world according to the aforementioned report.
The top three most downloaded apps are TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, followed by WhatsApp Messenger, Capcut, Telegram, Snapchat, Temu, WhatsApp Business and Facebook Messenger.
The nature of the top ten apps with the highest number of downloads sets a clear trend: eight of them are social networking and/or instant messaging apps, with only two of a different nature: Capcut in fifth position (a video editing tool owned by ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok) and Temu in eighth (the only shopping app to make it into the top 10).
By country, China stands out, followed by India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia, the five countries with the most downloads in 2023, with 113,000, 26,400, 12,600, 10,300 and 7,570 million apps downloaded respectively.
Apps with the longest usage time in the world
While the most downloaded applications were dominated by social networks, among the ten apps with the longest usage time in the world, some that are owned by Google stand out. Specifically, Youtube (in first position), the Chrome browser (sixth position), Phone by Google (eighth place) and Google itself (in tenth place).
Youtube is joined on the podium by two Meta apps: Facebook in second place and WhatsApp Messenger in third place.
By type of app and not by ‘owner’, social networks also continue to dominate. TikTok in fourth place, Instagram in fifth place and Facebook Messenger in ninth place should be added to those already mentioned.
In addition to all those already mentioned, only the Samsung Touchwiz Home app (in seventh position) remains to be added.
Spending on apps
Another curious fact to bear in mind in relation to apps is the amount that some users spend on them, a figure that, as we saw at the beginning of the article, stood at 171.3 billion US dollars in 2023.
If we break this figure down by country, we see that China is also by far the country with the highest total expenditure, with 52.1 billion dollars, followed by the United States (44.9 billion), Japan (17.9 billion), South Korea (7.86 billion) and the United Kingdom (4.45 billion).
If we consider expenditure as a percentage of GDP, we see that the top six countries belong to the Asian continent. These are Taiwan (0.54%), South Korea (0.46%), Japan (0.42%), Hong Kong (0.33%), China (0.29%) and Thailand (0.22%).
