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The Rise and Fall of Mobile Apps

Americans spend more time than ever before on their smartphones, as much as 40 hours per month. Part of the reason for this lies in the ever increasing number of applications, but also in the overall improved quality of those applications. Nevertheless, designers like Oded Kariti aren’t too happy with this figure, mainly because the numbers of downloaded applications on a monthly basis have been constantly dropping since 2012, and it appears that 27 seems to be the magic number. Namely, that is the average number of apps used in one month, regardless of new advancements in the market. The same thing goes for the rest of the world, outside U.S.A, and the only surprising part is which applications are considered as most popular, according to the number of downloads.

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The overall winner, coming in on the first place, with 41.2 million downloads is WhatsApp, followed by Messenger with 39.3 million users, Facebook with 36 million, Snapchat and its 27 million users, Instagram with 25.6 million, YouTube with 12.5 million, Uber 10.9 million , Spotify 10.2 million, Twitter with 8.3 million and Netflix with 7.5 million users. As you can see, Pokemon GO, which is currently a total hit, is not on the list, but as Oded Kariti states, the reason why this app didn’t made the list, is because these numbers are from May. The biggest surprise for Oded Kariti is YouTube’s low ranking, as well as the fact that four of the five most downloaded applications are owned by Facebook. Another surprise is that Twitter continues to drop down on numbers, while Uber, Netflix and Snapchat keep working their way up.

And while apps aren’t growing too much in popularity, wearable technology is becoming more important with each day passed. The growing popularity of this technology is confirmed by the fact that 6 out of 10 smartphone users consider that except for health and wellness, wearable technology can be used for many other purposes. After analyzing the opinion of 5,000 smartphone users, of which 2,500 use wearable technology, Oded Kariti concluded that according to company's predictions, there will be huge growth in the wearable technology market, by the year of 2020, or even could replace smartphones by helping users interact with things in the upcoming era of the Internet of Things.