The 3 Most Used Apps On My Phone Are All Owned By Facebook

Studies show that most people only use about five apps frequently and that is about right for me, but a strange thing happened today when I started to arrange the app icons on my phone. I tend to put the ones that I use the most in the dock because I try at all costs to avoid the actual phone (very 90s) and there is no way I am paying for text messages in this day and age.

When I looked down at my dock today, I noticed something strange: The three apps I use the most all belong to Facebook. Now I am obviously a power user because of my job and writing here, but the more I thought about it, the more it made me realize what a strong foothold Facebook has in mobile.

Let’s leave revenue completely aside for the moment (there are some serious questions how any of these apps will monetise, but that is a discussion for another day) and look at user adoption. It’s a given at this stage that nearly everybody uses Facebook on their phone and has an app of some sort. Over 500 million people do so every week and that number will only continue to grow. Instagram has over 50 million users and that is growing rapidly. The messenger app (an app called Beluga that Facebook acquired last year and rebranded) is starting to replace SMS for many and I spend huge amounts of my time using it, as do a younger generation.

The big worry I would have here is that the Facebook experience is starting to fragment slightly. For example, what happens with Instagram in the future? Will Facebook end up being like Android and fragmenting as a platform and harming the user experience?  For now, I’m just surprised that the three most used apps on my phone are all Facebook owned. That sort of crept up on me. People have been screaming from the rooftops that Facebook’s big weakness is mobile, but if you have three of the most popular apps out there, you can’t be doing all that bad. What about you? Do these three feature prominently on your phone?