Nielsen's Top Ten Apple iPhone and Android apps for 2012




When it came time to reveal the top ten Apple iPhone and Android apps for 2012, who would you call besides Nielsen? If the major television networks rely on the company's ability to count viewers, surely Nielsen can count how many times an app has been installed. The company's rankings are based on average monthly unique viewers counted from Q1 of 2012 to Q3.

The top Apple iPhone app was Maps. This is probably referring to the stock iOS app that was replaced by Apple Maps in iOS 6. After the problems with the new Apple Maps, Google recently launched a Maps app for iOS that was downloaded more than 10 million times in the first 48 hours. Meanwhile, from Q1 to Q3 this year, the original Google Maps averaged more than 32 million unique users a month which was a 23% gain from last year. Facebook was second and had a pretty impressive 51% gain to reach 29 million unique viewers a month. The original YouTube client, which also was removed in iOS 6, dropped 4% from last year to average 23 million unique viewers a month. Google has since replaced the client with a YouTube for iOS app. The stock Stocks app (see what we did there) was next and the stock Weather app rounds out the top five.









Android has a 52% market share in the U.S.
Facebook Messenger. The Weather Channel and Twitter were numbers six through eight while the top ten was completed by Pandora and Instagram. The latter had 6.9 million average unique viewers a month for a year-over-year increase of 197%. Facebook controls three of the top ten iOS apps (Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram).

The top Android app with 44 million average monthly unique viewers is Google Search. Gmail was a close second and Facebook finished third. The top three had year-over-year improvements of 54%, 45% and 48% respectively. The Android app in the top ten that showed the largest percentage gain in monthly users was Twitter with an average 10.6 million monthly unique viewers for a 122% gain over last year. The only Android app that showed a decline from 2011's numbers was Advanced Task Killer which slipped 11% to 9.6 million monthly unique viewers. Now that most new Android models have 1GB or more of RAM, the Task Killer might not be in so much demand. Twitter was 7th in the top ten Android apps of 2012 while the Advanced Task Killer was 9th.

Other interesting stats from Nielsen showed that Android is the top platform in the U.S. with a 52% market share compared with 35% for iOS. BlackBerry was third with 7% while Windows Phone was next with 2%. 2012 is also the first year that the majority of mobile phone users were sporting a smartphone (56%) instead of a featurephone. The statistics came from Nielsen's on-device Smartphone Panel which measures usage.



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