If you think the mobile app marketplace remains a wide-open gold rush where anyone with a good idea and some decent programming skills can change the world, you're living in the past.
A look at the most recent comScore numbers of the top 15 U.S. mobile apps from June 2015 tells a very clear story. The vast majority of the most popular apps are owned by huge public companies, and the list has hardly changed in the past year.
Here is comScore's list of the top 15 apps from June 2015:
- YouTube
- Facebook Messenger
- Google Search
- Google Play
- Google Maps
- Pandora Radio
- Gmail
- Yahoo Stocks
- Apple Maps
- iTunes Radio/iCloud
- Amazon Mobile
- Snapchat
But hey, maybe this year's list is an anomaly, and these corporate warriors have just now taken over from a bunch of scrappy upstarts. Or maybe not, as a look at last year's comScore list quickly reveals:
- YouTube
- Google Play
- Google Search
- Pandora Radio
- Google Maps
- Gmail
- Yahoo Stocks
- Facebook Messenger
- Apple Maps
- Yahoo Weather Widget
- iTunes Radio/iCloud
- Google+
See also: Why I won't write a requiem for Google+
This kind of stability isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many people use many of the top apps, and they are typically very well done and very useful. More to the point, perhaps, the mobile market is so big that there is likely plenty of room for smaller players to find success below the level of the top 15 apps.But that gold rush/wild west idea I mentioned above, that's pretty much over. These days, mobile app landscape looks a lot more like a cross between Wall Street and a mainstream shopping mall.