Snapshot, Vine, and Candy Crush Saga earned coveted spots on smartphones this year, making them among the most downloaded apps of the year.
There
are more than a million apps on Apple Inc's App Store and Google Inc's
Play store, the two dominant marketplaces for apps, which see billions
of downloads each year.
This year, the most downloaded apps were new takes on communication, gaming, and entertainment, according to mobile app experts.
"2013 was a really interesting year in terms of maturation, milestones and new trends," said Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at Fiksu, a mobile marketing company based in Boston. "The most downloaded apps were in familiar categories, but offered new twists," he added.
While old favorites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - available for iPhone, Android and other devices - continued to be popular ways of communicating with friends, Snapchat eclipsed
them in downloads in 2013, becoming the sixth most downloaded free app
of the year on the App Store, according to Apple.
"Snapchat
went from being a niche app to achieving much more critical mass, so
much so that Facebook was reportedly willing to spend billions of
dollars to acquire the company," said Palli.
With Snapchat, users can send photos and videos that disappear shortly after they are viewed.
Launched
in 2011, the app's user base continued to grow rapidly in 2013, with
over 13 million people using the app in October, according to the
lastest available estimates from global information and measurement
company Nielsen. In December alone, over 400 million pieces of content
were shared through the app, according to Snapchat, based in Venice, CA.
Vine, a video sharing app released earlier this year by microblogging company Twitter Inc,
was the fourth most downloaded free app in 2013. The app, for iPhone,
Android and other devices, allows users to share videos under six
seconds in length. Nielsen estimates over 6 million people in the US
were using the app in October of this year.
Snapchat and Vine fall into a category that mobile analytics firm Flurry calls camera-enhanced messaging, which they said grew eightfold in 2013.
"The
communications category underwent phenomenal growth this year.
Messaging apps like Snapchat, Line, Kakao (KakaoTalk) and WeChat are all
exploding and becoming bigger than the carriers in their home countries
in terms of users," said Simon Khalaf, chief executive of San
Francisco-based company Flurry.
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