A report by Axios claims that in 2021, Google and Facebook lead the mobile app market in the United States. Since 2015, both apps have dominated the mobile app industry: users’ Google usage on mobile grown from 33% in 2015 to 46% in 2021, and Facebook has maintained a 20% market share since 2015.
The report explains that Google and Facebook are the leading smartphone apps in the country because both companies own the top 10 social media, streaming, navigation, weather, and other apps.
The top 15 apps in the U.S. as of this month are:
- YouTube
- Gmail
- Google Maps
- Google Search
- Facebook Messenger
- Amazon
- Weather Channel
- Google Play
- Apple News
- Google Drive
- Google Photos
- Pandora
- Spotify
Google and Facebook maintain the mobile app industry in the United States, despite competition
Recently, TikTok and Zoom have emerged as the two most popular apps with the highest number of downloads. But, Google and Facebook are not just apps but companies which own other popular apps like Instagram, YouTube, and Google Maps. Axios writes that dominance matters because it reflects users’ usage trends.
Most of our time engaging with digital content happens in mobile apps. Google and Facebook continue to dominate the app economy, and through it, the attention economy.
Nearly 80% of all digital minutes are spent on mobile, per Comscore, and roughly 88% of those mobile minutes are spent within apps.
- Properties that skew toward mobile-only usage tend to be linked to sectors that Google and Facebook dominate via apps, like social media, messaging and news and information. Markets where Google and Facebook do not have a dominant position, like higher education and training, tend to be more focused on desktop use.
Both tech giants are facing antitrust investigations by regulatory bodies in the United States, European Union, Australia, and other countries because of their dominance in the tech industry. They are accused of the anti-competitive policy of ‘acquire and kill’ to crush smaller developers, especially Facebook. If found guilty, the Facebook-owned app, Instagram might be broken up into individual entities.
