More than five years after smartphone use has become quite commonplace, and we have a wide array of fully-fledged apps cutting across all possible genres. Even though there are several dozens app genres available on various platforms, such Google’s PlayStore or Apple’s iTunes, there are a handful of popular ones that most users will always have on their phones. Even tech blogs, such as the one at Enplug.com, a popular tech blog, note that the average smartphone user will have at least one app from five of the multiple genres available on the market today. So, what are the top genres?
1. Games
There’s no refuting that almost each one of us fancies a challenging game, especially to pass time. So, it is not also surprising that the most downloaded mobile-based applications in 2016 were games. Again, this is in tandem with the fact that gaming apps account for close to 25% of all application across all mobile platforms; be it Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS.
2. Business
The world has transformed significantly as far as the mode of conducting business goes. And part of this has been fueled by the availability of a wide range of business and productivity applications across the board. In line with this, a good chunk of the most downloaded apps in 2016 were business-oriented mobile or web apps that were responsible for the steady revolutionizing of modern business that is almost palpable today.
3. Education
The inception of long-distance learning a few years ago ushered in a unique era of specialized learning through mobile-based applications. The internet has made the world such a small place that the average user has a ton of useful info within their immediate reach. And this is exactly the potential that most popular mobile apps seek to harness by offering an easy, interactive way for users to access useful/relevant data via their smartphones. And granted that there are now more people than ever before with access to powerful smartphones/tablets, it is also not surprising that education-related apps have dominated last year’s popularity meter.
4. Lifestyle and Social Media Interaction
We are living in a consumer and communication-driven society. In fact, with an unfettered popularity of social media platforms, it is easy to see why lifestyle apps dominated in 2016. Social media popularity, for instance, has shot up by almost 6.7% in the past year alone. Never have we witnessed more people purchasing handheld gadgets just to sign up for social media forums than in 2016. And as expected, social media fuels the culture of consumerism which explains the unprecedented popularity that lifestyle apps have enjoyed in 2016.
5. Health and Fitness
Thanks to the ongoing mass sensitization of healthy living, more people are seeing the need to integrate some of these fully-fledged health apps into their daily schedule. And this ranges from smartphone applications that are designed to monitor crucial aspects of a healthy life (such as your heart-rate), to those that are meant to work with external third-party gadgetry such as fitness bands or smartwatches.
So, does your device have apps from these top genres? I would expect that it does!
