‘You may own Apple’s phone, but you’re using Google’s apps’

Instagram-a Facebook company-was certainly a popular app in 2015. Nielsen says it’s Facebook. Results show that the list of apps was topped by none other than Facebook Inc.

There are hundreds of thousands of apps available for your smartphone, whether you own an iPhone or an Android handset.

In the months since, the app had surged to the top of the App Store’s charts.

Other Google apps making the list were Google Search (No. 4, 95.04 million users), Google Play (No. 5, 89.71 million), Google Maps (No. 6, 87.78 million) and Gmail (No. 7, 75.11 million). Apple’s iOS came in with a market share of 42.7 percent, and Microsoft and Blackberry were left to fight over scraps at 2.8 percent and 0.7 percent respectively. It was an eight percent increase compared to past years.

Google’s YouTube ranked second with 97.6 million average unique users each month. The figure presents a five-percent jump from 2014 for this video-streaming app. The fastest-growing app for the year among the top 10 was Facebook Messenger, up 41%, and taking the third spot. Apple’s apps, Apple Music and Apple Maps landed in positions nine and ten. All told, the standalone app saw a 31% increase in users.

Google is working on a new “smart” messaging service that will be able automatically answer users’ questions, sources with knowledge of the plans tell The Wall Street Journal’s Alistair Barr. Its search app was in the fourth place. There are no games, no shopping apps, and no real productivity apps-and none of the burgeoning social media apps, like Snapchat or Tumblr, have managed to upend the incumbents. It has accumulated 55.4 million unique users per month.

Apple-made apps landed in the ninth and tenth spots in Neilson’s yearly rankings.

The new Facebook updates were rolled out on Wednesday, and as mentioned above, it is the Facebook Messenger for Business platform that dominated the updates with two novel features.

The data presented by Nielsen were based on a monthly survey conducted for more than 30,000 mobile phone subscribers.