The glorified titans in the world of networking, Google and Facebook, have once again proved their dominance. The new list of year’s top applications released today by Nielsen was totally shadowed by mobile applications of these two mammoths.
As expected, Facebook with an average of 146 million unique users per month, was once again placed at the first spot in the list. The application also showed a 14% growth over last year. Apart from this, other Facebook properies such as Messenger (#2) and Instagram (#8) also bagged positions in the top 10 list with the latter showing the maximum growth rate year-to- year of 36% from 2015.
With an average 129 million unique monthly users, messenger scored the second position in the list followed by YouTube with over 113 million unique monthly users. But interestingly, it was not Facebook but Google that bagged maximum positions in the top 10 list. Google applications such as Youtube(#3), Google Maps(#4), Google Search(#5), Google Play(#6) and Gmail(#7) were amongst the most popular applications in the Nielsen’s list.
Considering the fact that they deal in some very basic utilities such as video surfing, searching, maps, gaming and mail, it is very explainable how they grabbed such high ranks. Meanwhile, another interesting thing Nielsen discovered was Amazon’s boost in 2016. E-commerce websites broke records through various mega sales, and Amazon was held accountable for a huge share, as much as 37%, of those numbers.
The trend of online shopping is only increasing with time and Amazon mobile app has shown a 43% increase in unique monthly users since 2015. Nielsen also peeked into the status of smart phones in the United States discovering that 88% of the mobile subscribers are now using smartphones, another enhancement from 86% in the starting of the year. 53% of them are Android users, 45% on iOS and merely 2% on Windows. Blackberry somehow managed to cling to the charts with 1% share.
