07 Dec The importance of mobile apps in our everyday lives
Advancements in modern technology have changed our lives forever. Whether it has done so for the better or worse is a debate for another day. But it’s hard to argue how much we now rely on the likes of mobile apps to help us live our day-to-day lives.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the importance of mobile apps and some of the most popular and life-critical apps that we use today.
Table of Contents
How apps became so widely used
It may seem like an entire age away when we used to rely on writing things down with a bit of paper and a pen, putting appointments in our diaries, and phones were used to just call people. But realistically speaking, it was only in the mid-2000s, about 20 years ago, when smartphones really began to take off.
One of the big selling points was thanks to Apple and its marketing for the iPhone, where it began to demonstrate all the things it could do. It would list a number of different daily tasks that we probably took for granted and then say, “there’s an app for that” to show that everything you do in your daily life was now much easier and could be done on your phone.
Slowly but surely, the fascination of being able to do normal everyday tasks on your phone soon took off. And with people looking at ways to reduce waste and help the environment, using mobile apps became a better alternative to wasting paper which was made by chopping down trees. This only further strengthens our reliance on mobile apps as we leave the old way of doing things behind us.
What we use mobile apps for
There is a chance you’re currently using a mobile browser to read this post, indicating, firstly, one of the main things we use mobile apps for. Browsing the internet. Yes, we spend a lot of time on our phones browsing the internet, whether that be for checking emails, watching funny cat videos, doing a spot of shopping, and much more. But many of the sites you visit will also have their own apps now. In fact, if they host their site on WordPress, it’s likely they could be developing and running their website from a mobile app.
Another big use nowadays besides browsing the internet is social media. We post all about our lives online now, whether that be on Facebook, Twitter, or new platforms such as Hive. There are so many out there, but they can have a dark side where people troll others on the internet and try to cause upset and sadness. Fortunately, they are few and far between, and the majority of people can enjoy social media and the good it does to help us to connect with loved ones.
We even use mobile apps for travel. From grabbing an Uber in times square on a busy night to booking flights or trains to travel from one side of the country to the other, you can find, book, and store tickets through your mobile device. Then on top of that, you can even unlock cars nowadays with rental car firms in the US, such as Enterprise Rent-a-Car, now introducing this technology to make picking up a rental even easier.
And finally, entertainment. Whether you are playing games, watching the latest movies, TV shows, or live sports, you can do it all from the palm of your hand using mobile apps. And best of all, you can just open the apps up, use them, shut them down, and pick up where you left off when you go back at a later time. It really has revolutionized the way that we absorb entertainment.
Take, for example, live sports. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a game, you had to go and pay for a ticket. Then TV rights became involved, but not everyone could afford a fancy cable subscription. Now, you can live stream sports for free, although whether some of those mobile apps are legal or not is another matter.
But there are free ways you can watch live sports that are legal. Some broadcasters will air games for free on their dedicated apps. However, restrictions are sometimes in place, so you aren’t able to cast them on your Smart TV. Then you have sports betting apps that allow you to live to stream a number of sports from around the world. Some of these require you to have placed a bet on a game. Others just ask that you have funds in your account.
But sports betting apps do a whole lot more too. With features such as in-play betting becoming more common, you are able to track what is going on as your favorite events take place. Odds change in real-time, as do the reports on the games, which can feature live statistics and even an interactive infographic to show you what is going on in a game in terms of who has possession, where a pass is being made, and who by.
The best part about these sports betting apps, though, is they are becoming more widely available as sports betting continues to become legalized across several states, especially this year when these apps were launched in more than five states in the US. The next state expected to launch these betting apps in Ohio on New Years day. Some countries around the world, such as the UK, have had them for much longer, but it is only in recent years that they have appeared in the US with states like New York becoming notorious for being incredibly popular with billions of dollars in bets having been handled since its launch at the beginning of the year.
You can also obviously use them to place your bets too, including being able to deposit funds into your account and withdraw winnings. The money that you deposit and withdraw those funds to and from must come from somewhere, though, right? Your bank account? An e-wallet? Whatever method you use, guess what? Yes, “there’s an app for that”. You can also manage your day-to-day finances with banking apps, set up payments for bills, invest money in stocks and shares or even cryptocurrencies, and even use them to pay for things in shops using NFC contactless payments.
What are the most popular apps?
With so many apps available, you may think it’s hard to narrow down what the most popular ones are. But because the majority are downloaded through official stores like the Google Play Store, it makes it incredibly easy to track. We can see how many times an app has been downloaded, along with its rating from users and their reviews of using the app.
So what are the most popular? Well, a recent study listed the 15 most popular mobile apps by global downloads for 2022. And here is what made a list:
- TikTok
- Telegram
- Zoom
- Snapchat
- Facebook Messenger
- CapCut
- Spotify
- YouTube
- HBO Max
- Cash App
- Subway Surfers
- Roblox
As we can see, social media clearly dominates the list, followed by messaging apps, with the two different types of mobile apps taking up the top eight places on the list. You then have CapCut, a video editing app that is used to edit TikTok videos, so it is still linked to social media, followed by streaming services for both music and video.
There are then two games on the list. Subway Surfers a super casual game that is easy to pick up and put down to waste a few minutes here and there. Then Minecraft, the biggest selling game in history, where people craft themselves a new life in a virtual world where they can hunt monsters, build castles, and live out a range of fantasies in an online world.
The only misfit on the list is Cash App. An American app used similar to PayPal for sending and receiving money between friends and family and when purchasing goods online.
Apps All The Way!
As you can see, mobile apps have pretty much taken over our lives. We rely on them so much because they help us to complete the simplest of daily tasks and also more complex ones too. And funnily enough, whilst everyone is ignoring each other in the real world as they are glued to their mobile apps, they are also strangely bringing people together at the same time. It’ll be very interesting to see how this all looks another twenty years from now to see what more we can do and whether their importance remains the same.
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