Nielsen Holdings N.V., a global information and measurement company, has released its latest report looking at some of the top digital trends, including the top US smartphone apps and operating systems.
The report shows that Facebook remains the number one app with around 126,702,000 average monthly users, and its instant messaging app, Messenger, is the fastest growing application of 2015, with a 31 percent increase in users from last year.
The top ten apps of the year all came from just three companies – Facebook, Google, and Apple. It’s the second year in a row that the Facebook app holds the number one slot, and it's still quite a way ahead of its nearest rival – YouTube – which is the second most popular app with 97 million average unique users each month.
Fastest-growing app Messenger’s 31 percent growth puts it ahead of Apple music, which saw its popularity grow by 26 percent this year. When Facebook removed Messenger functionality from the main app in April 2014 - forcing people who wanted to chat via Facebook to download the standalone app – Messenger popularity grew 242 percent. Facebook will no doubt be hoping that its Moments app receives a similar boost next year; the company is discontinuing support for photo syncing in its mobile apps next month, and anyone who wishes to continue using the feature will have to download Moments.
In the world of smartphone operating systems, Andriod’s 52.6 percent of the US market share makes it the favorite OS, ahead of iOS’s 42.7 percent. Just under three percent of US smartphone owners used a handset that operated on a Windows Phone, and Blackberry still hangs on to a 0.7 percent share of the market. Smartphone penetration grew to 80% of U.S. mobile subscribers at the end of September 2015 from 78% at the start of the year.
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