And the top app of 2015 is ... Facebook, again
Once again, Facebook is the No. 1 application installed on smartphones in the United States, according to a report from the folks at Nielsen. Facebook’s iOS app actually has a strong lead, yet the fastest growing application isn’t Facebook itself but rather Facebook Messenger, which took the No. 3 position overall.
The social network on iOS
YouTube was the second most-popular application on U.S. smartphones, and Google Search took fourth place. For Facebook Messenger, however, 2015 has been a great year for growth; its year-over-year change was a massive increase of 31 percent (compared with YouTube’s five percent increase, and Google Search’s three percent increase).
Image credit: Nielsen.
The app king Facebook’s average unique users, then, sits at around 126,702,000, according to Nielsen.
Apple’s iOS vs. Android
TechCrunch delivered the report, and had something to say about the age-old iOS vs. Android battle. The same data from Nielsen also noted that, in the United States, Google’s mobile OS remains top dog with a slightly larger share of the market than Apple’s iOS:
Meanwhile, in terms of the battle between operating systems, the U.S. still slightly favors Android with a 52.6 percent market share compared with 42.7 percent for iOS. Barely 3 percent of smartphone users owned a Windows Phone device in the past year, followed by BlackBerry which somehow still managed to claim a 0.7 percent share of the market.
Image credit: Nielsen.
Again, the breakdown of data serves to highlight how significant iOS and Android are in the U.S. market (and how insignificant Windows Phone and BlackBerry remain and have become). This is data for the United States, mind you, and isn’t global. Nevertheless, more than 95 percent of the United States is running iOS and Android, which is an impressive figure.
