New App Annie data interpreted by Marketing Resources Incorporated points to Facebook and associated apps take three of the top five spots in the United States app market, though they’re not found clumped together on the charts anywhere else in the world. Facebook Messenger is the most popular app in the United States, according to the data, followed by the main Facebook app, then Instagram. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is missing from the ranking, with the top five for the US app market rounded out by Snapchat and Google’s extremely popular video streaming service YouTube. America’s love for Facebook products is bested by Brazil, who managed to get all four Facebook apps on the charts, with YouTube in fifth place, and by India, whose chart looks similar, but with YouTube in second place. The social giant only finds its properties completely out of the top five in China and Switzerland.
Internationally, the top five charts for different countries say something about their culture in many cases. Germany’s top two apps are both associated with McDonald’s, indicating that the restaurant chain has a large fan base among the country’s tech-literate. China, as a different example, has a top five completely filled with locally made favorites like QQ, WeChat, and AliPay, reflecting the insular digital world created by the Great Firewall. On the other side of the same coin, this data was gathered geographically, so those using VPN apps to access services banned in their home countries end up giving representation for those apps to the countries that host the VPN servers, rather than their actual domestic markets.
Some global trends can also be found in the newly published data. The most obvious example is that communication and social apps of some sort are in literally all of the charts. A quick glance over the infographic below will also tell you that YouTube has a near-global foothold, and is indeed the most popular video streaming service in the world, even if it’s less popular or entirely absent in some places. Mobile gaming also seems to be gaining quite the global foothold; 11 of the 25 countries in the dataset have at least one mobile game in the top five charts, meaning that the games are popular enough to surpass a number of social, video and communication apps that could have taken those spots.
