It is hard to believe that Google Play is only celebrating its 5th birthday today on March 6, 2017. It seems like it has been around forever, but before we needed a Goggle Play Store, we first needed a reason for it to exist. After all, the first Android smartphones have only been around for about nine years when the T-Mobile G1 made its debut – and even it was very primitive by today’s standards. Now, with the Android OS dominating the world, the Google Play Store is needed more than ever. It is not only a one-stop shopping place for millions of apps, your favorite games, movies, TV shows, and books, but it also offers a high level of security – you can be confident that when you download something from Google Play, it will (usually) be virus-free and will run on your device.
As Google expands, so do the places where you can access the Google Play Store from, and in five years it has grown to over one billion active users in 190 countries. It has millions of apps, 40 million songs, 5 million books and thousands of movies. The Google Play Store allows a buyer the convenience of going to one place for their Android apps and regardless of device, being tied in with Google, the Play Store knows what kind of devices you own and if the app you are looking at is compatible with all of your devices or only part of them.
To commemorate the birthday, Google Play has compiled a list of the ‘most popular’ over the past five years in the US. Under the ‘Top Installed Games’ we have Candy Crush Saga topping the list, followed by Subway Surfers, Temple Run 2, Despicable Me, and Clash of Clans. The ‘Top Installed Apps’ (download only) starts with Facebook and Facebook Messenger in the top one and two spots followed by Pandora, Instagram, and Snapchat. The ‘Top Selling Songs’ starts with Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud, Lorde’s Royals, Taylor Swift’s Blank Space, Mark Ronson/Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk, and Pharrell Williams’ Happy. ‘Top Selling Albums’ start with Adele’s 25, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP2, Taylor Swift’s 1989, Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. ‘Top Selling Movies’ begins with The Interview, Frozen, Deadpool, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Guardians of the Galaxy. ‘Top Selling Books’ starts with Fifty Shades of Grey, The Hunger Games Trilogy, A Game of Thrones, The Fault in Our Stars, and Gone Girl.