Most popular apps on Smartphone

With thousands of apps listed in app stores of handset vendors, you may be wondering which are the most popular apps or the apps that are used everyday. According to Nielsen, some of the most popular Smartphone apps are Facebook, Google Maps, Pandora, weather channel, YouTube and ESPN. Iam not surprised by these apps making to the top list. I use most of these apps myself on iPhone. One of the apps that is missing in the list is twitter client. Games are the most downloaded apps on all platforms. We don’t need Nielsen data to know this one. It’s obvious. iPhone users download more apps than other Smartphone users.


Here are some other interesting facts:
• Games are the most downloaded – both free and paid
• Facebook, Google Maps and Weather Channel are the most popular apps across smartphones
o iPhones: Facebook (58%), iTunes (48%), Google Maps (47%)
o Android: Google Maps (67%), Facebook (50%), Weather Channel (38%)
o Blackberry: Facebook (51%), Google Maps(34%), Weather Channel (28%)
• Social Networking: Facebook clearly favorite app, but MySpace is hugely popular among teens; LinkedIn attracts adults 25-44
• News/weather: Weather Channel was used by 58%; age distribution across sites was similar, save for Time Mobile and Thomson Reuters
• Shopping: Amazon and eBay lead (57% and 41%)
• Search/Map: skew male, particularly Instamapper (80/20)
• Video/Movie: skewed towards males; Imeem and Moviefone show a higher proportion of young users
• Music: iTunes, Pandora, Sirius XM appeal more to males, while Yahoo Music almost evenly split

Iam sure you guys must be wondering why iPad apps details are missing. Maybe in future, Nielsen will come up with another category of apps analysis for tablets, and iam sure iPad will rule the list.