Top mobile apps of 2020: TikTok, Fitbit, ‘Roblox’ and ‘Among Us’ lead the way

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Market intelligence firm Apptopia released its report on the most downloaded mobile apps of 2020. In a year that was defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, many people’s behavior on- and offline changed dramatically, and there’s a lot to learn about the year in what was and wasn’t getting installed on phones and tablets.

For apps, TikTok ruled both the worldwide and U.S. charts for mobile downloads in 2020. Despite a crazy year, it still managed to pull down well over half a billion dollars in gross revenue worldwide, coming in above other high earners like Tinder ($513 million), YouTube ($478 million), and Disney+ ($314 million).

An unsurprising newcomer to the top 10, both here and abroad, was Zoom, which went from an occasional option to a necessary working tool during 2020’s quarantines. It racked up 477 million downloads worldwide and 81 million in the U.S. Google Meet came in well behind it at 254 million downloads worldwide, and didn’t crack the top 10 in the U.S. rankings. Nobody seems to like Zoom, but everyone seems to be using it regardless.

TikTok may have taken the No. 1 spot, but Facebook’s got a lot of mobile real estate. (Apptopia Image)

In a similar vein, four of the top ten most downloaded apps on Apptopia’s chart are Facebook-owned, which goes a long way toward highlighting the degree to which Facebook has integrated itself into the basic fabric of 21st-century life. The dedicated mobile apps for WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger scored nearly two billion downloads between them worldwide. With Facebook currently in the FTC’s crosshairs for anti-competitive conduct, it’ll be interesting to see if its hammerlock on the mobile market is affected, and if so, to what degree.

As Apptopia notes, Netflix managed to crash into the top 10 highest-grossing apps for 2020 both domestically and worldwide, despite the fact that its app doesn’t accept new customer payments via the app stores and hasn’t for two years now. It’s a testament to the extent to which Netflix owns the streaming market; it’s rare when Netflix doesn’t host at least eight of the ten highest-rated shows.

Another sign of the effects of 2020 on the world comes from the charts for health & fitness apps, where two sleep and meditation programs, Calm and Headspace, both ranked surprisingly high. Calm in particular is both the No. 1 most downloaded and highest-grossing app in this category for the year, suggesting that no, you’re not the only one who had a hard time getting to sleep in 2020.

Just as with the PC and console markets, the top mobile games of 2020 weren’t actually released in 2020. (Apptopia Image)

The year’s big winner in the mobile gaming scene was, unsurprisingly, InnerSloth’s Among Us. Apptopia credits it with 264 million downloads worldwide, 41 million of which were from mobile devices in the U.S., which makes it the most downloaded mobile game of 2020.

Globally, this puts Among Us ahead of several established hits like Subway Surfers (No. 2), a shockingly popular “endless runner” from Denmark; Garena Free Fire (No. 3), a Unity-powered battle-royale game that was one of the biggest global hits of 2019, mostly in Latin America and Asia; and Gardenscapes, a 2016 puzzle game from Playrix, headquartered in Dublin.

Among Us, developed in the Seattle area, was obscure for most of the two years after its 2018 launch, but thanks to regular updates from its small dev team, it built steady word of mouth before suddenly going viral this summer. While it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Among Us will continue its current momentum going into the new year, it did beat perennial juggernaut Roblox for total U.S. downloads this year, and that’s a significant accomplishment.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ponders her vote in a round of Among Us. (Twitch screenshot)

Even so, Roblox is one of the most successful apps in the world right now, although it’s nearly invisible to anyone who doesn’t have children. Roblox scored 158 million downloads and $487 million worldwide in 2020.

Interestingly, the mobile charts are one part of gaming that isn’t dominated by Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, which usually releases its latest installment in the fourth quarter for PC/console and promptly becomes the best-selling game for the year. The Warzone mobile game racked up 29 million downloads in the U.S., which puts it at No. 4, but it doesn’t crack the top 10 internationally.

In a reversal of that, many PC/console gamers have been sleeping on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds recently. PUBG effectively invented the “battle royale” subgenre of action games, famously adopting it from the plot of the 2000 Japanese movie Battle Royale, but many have seen it as getting its lunch eaten by higher-profile competitors in the last couple of years.

Between Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, there isn’t a lot of oxygen left in that particular room right now, and PUBG‘s player population at any given time is respectable and stable, but a relative fraction of its competitors’. It’s got a number of people playing it at any given time that’s usually somewhere in the high six digits. That may sound good, but keep in mind that at roughly the same time, several million people are playing Fortnite.

On mobile, however, PUBG is the highest-grossing game of 2020, taking in $1.1 billion dollars in overall international revenue, well above other hits like Pokemon GO ($757 million) and Roblox ($487 million). PUBG doesn’t chart at all in the U.S., but it’s making money hand over fist in other territories, with a total of 175 million downloads (No. 4 overall) in 2020. If you’re one of the players who’s been wondering what’s keeping PUBG afloat in a world where Fortnite is basically its own nation-state, now you have an answer.

What springs out at me here is that, particularly on a worldwide level, the numbers are impressively high. In Apptopia’s top 10 list of games measured by gross revenue worldwide, the No. 10 highest-earning game of 2020 is Westward Journey, the 2015 mobile adaptation of a popular Chinese massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It “only” made $468 million last year, which was barely enough to crack into the top 10.

There’s a tendency in the mainstream gaming press to ignore most of the mobile market, due to a variety of factors (innate biases, low quality control on app stores, many of the games being fairly simple and difficult to meaningfully discuss, etc.), but from time to time there’s a frankly insane amount of money being made here. Some sources will attribute well over half of the global revenue from the video game industry to the mobile market, which is easier to believe when you see how much money the top mobile games are pulling in.

The report uses the firm’s particular combination of models and analytics dashboards, which it claims is within a 20% margin of error for absolute values. It also draws upon combined information from iOS and Google Play, with data for “lite” versions of any particular app rolled into that app’s overall total. Chinese data is specifically limited to the iOS platform.

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/top-mobile-apps-2020-tiktok-fitbit-roblox-among-us-lead-way/