If you are looking to build an app in 2024, you need to look at what the data says about the most popular app categories. There are app categories where the competition is quite fierce but the market size keeps growing. Other categories are relatively small and competition is not too much of a concern. In this article, we highlight the 20 most popular app categories on the Play Store for Android devices.

Gaming

Gaming apps have been the most popular app category over the last decade and there is good reason for it. The most popular gaming apps offer an immersive experience for users which increases screen time and total revenue generated. As processors have become more powerful, games have improved user experiences to mirror what users would experience on dedicated gaming consoles. Better screens, battery sizes, and fast charging capacity have also contributed to phone gaming becoming more ubiquitous.

Mobile phones have long overtaken consoles in terms of revenue generation, mostly because phones are much more accessible than consoles worldwide. Consoles are also not as portable as phones and tablets.

There are numerous categories of games with casinos, puzzles, adventure, and strategy-based games leading the way. Games have built communities through leaderboards, in-game communication, and online events helping popularize games even further.

Ride-Hailing

Ride-hailing apps are still a popular app category on the Play Store in 2024. These apps present several advantages for users including being able to use one of several payment methods. In addition, users appreciate being able to see the exact cost of their rides beforehand, the expected length of their journey, and the location of their driver prior to and upon request.

For businesses, such an app is great for fleet management because it would have a dashboard to view revenue generated, driver statistics, and a lot of other management-related metrics.

Business Apps

This is a broad category encompassing all apps geared to facilitating business-related work. For instance, Skype, Google Meet, and Zoom can be classed as business apps because they are mainly used by teams working remotely. Besides the meeting feature, these apps have inbuilt features such as document sharing, meeting moderation buttons, and even integration with scheduling apps such as Calendly to ease appointment bookings.

Other business apps such as Slack are used for workflow management, especially in team settings. Managers can assign tasks, people can submit their portions of a project, and there can be channels for discussing different matters. Upcoming deadlines are also easier to track with dedicated work management applications.

E-commerce apps

The e-commerce space continues to grow as more shopping happens online rather than in-store. There are multiple reasons why e-commerce makes sense for a lot of brands. First, apps can use personalized user profiles to avail targeted catalogs of products for customers to view. This means what users see on their homepages is what they are most likely to be interested in. In addition, users can add items to a cart and complete their purchase later.

With a smooth checkout process, e-commerce apps improve the likelihood of converting users who download an app into buying customers. Apps also allow stores to run promo campaigns for all or a section of customers depending on intended goals.

Medical Apps

With an increasing demand for wellness-related information, users find it worthy to have applications where they can find factual and up-to-date information. Medical practitioners can build medical apps as part of their business. Some practitioners may even carry out consultations via video (telemedicine). Such apps have other features such as physical appointment scheduling and tracking of personal health information. Other apps can be purely dedicated to information sharing through videos, articles, research papers, and other useful mediums of information sharing.

As time goes on, medical apps will have more utility as people embrace wellness and realize the power of being able to get accurate information in real time.

E-learning Apps

The internet has democratized access to information and people can now learn most skills for free. E-learning apps organize information and package it in a manner that is easy for users to follow and track progress. In 2024, the demand for e-learning apps will continue to grow as more people seek to upskill to progress their careers or to simply explore new hobbies.

According to Statista there, e-learning apps receive over 400 million downloads every year. The industry is now worth more than $200 billion and has grown by over 900% since 2000. The search for learning apps-related keywords has also been rising year-on-year for the last decade. This goes to show that there is indeed a demand for quality learning apps. The most popular learning categories are IT and web development, business and finance, marketing, art and photography, languages, and gaming.

Health and Fitness Apps

Health and fitness apps continue to be a popular app category in 2024. Fitness has become an aspirational thing for a lot of people in this decade. The growth of the fitness-dedicated wearables market is a testament to this growth. Fitness apps provide tools such as workout programs and meal plans for users depending on personal goals.

Apps can either be driven by a celebrity trainer or by the quality of the information being availed to users. Apps can also differentiate themselves through a high-quality UI and integration with other apps to enhance the overall experience for users.

Travel and Navigation Apps

This broad category includes all apps geared towards helping people plan trips better or find interesting outdoor activities to take in a particular area. If an app is targets travellers and adventurers, creators have the arduous task of finding interesting places to review and add to their app. By enabling users to comment and make recommendations, these apps can quickly build user communities.

There are other apps meant solely for information crowd-sourcing. Here, people simply post reviews and recommendations about places to stay, places to eat, and how to move around when visiting a particular city as a visitor.

Social Networking

While it may feel like the biggest social media apps have taken up all available market space, there is still room for new social apps. Their growth is highly dependent on the ability to create new experiences for users. TikTok grew so fast through short videos, prompting all other popular platforms to prioritize short videos over other forms of content being shared there. Virtual reality could be the next frontier for social networks. Still, there are other important discussions such as content moderation and user privacy that could create room for new social networks to emerge and grow.

Streaming

Livestreaming has become commonplace is a wide range of industries owing to the reduced cost of broadband access all over the world. Brands are taking advantage of being able to interact live with their clients to create value opportunities. Therefore, building a live-streaming app remains a viable opportunity if well executed.

The sports industry has embraced live streaming on official apps as a way to fight illegal streaming while widening access to their content. Gyms have begun live-streaming classes for subscribers who cannot make it physically to the gym. Other gyms have opted for a class-on-demand approach, similar to what content streaming platforms such as Netflix do.

Live stream shopping is a very interesting emerging sector too. Here, brands go live and showcase new products or review existing ones while allowing customers to comment or ask questions. It’s a great way to sell limited-edition merchandise or build excitement about new items.

Finance and Banking

More people are embracing the power of having control over their finances using their phones. Finance and banking apps can be broken down through the various purposes they may be serving. First, budgeting apps help people to have a better view of their spending patterns through expenditure tracking. Through interactive dashboards, such apps help users to set goals such as cutting down spending or saving for a holiday.

Some finance apps are more geared towards helping people invest in regulated financial products. These apps are owned by licensed investment banks or exchanges. The apps place great importance on securing user information, providing a smooth experience, integration with multiple payment methods, and maintaining high

News and Information

The popularity of social media means that a lot of people get information from their phones as opposed to traditional sources. However, social media also presents the challenge of trying to separate what is true and what is misinformation. High-quality news app is a category of applications targeting discerning people who want well-researched information about subjects they care about. These apps therefore serve a dual purpose of cutting out the noise and providing detailed information. In certain cases, these news apps will charge a premium for access.

An example of such an app is Ground New Pros. The app curates news articles, mainly political, and gives a summary in a few sentences while allowing you the option to open the entire story. Interestingly, the app has a feature that indicates whether a new story has a right-leaning, center, or left inclination politically. This helps users know which articles may be there to sway readers.

Food and Cooking

Food and cooking apps serve several purposes. First, there are apps made for users who want to learn to cook at a professional level. Such apps could be categorized as educational too. However, a large number of apps in this category offer cooking tutorials for people who want to explore new recipes for fun. Through AI-powered recommendations, these apps could help users develop a wide and rich palette by combining foods and drinks from different cultures.

Food and cooking apps could also come with auxiliary features such as being able to order ingredients from particular stores that may in fact own or advertise on the app.

Self-care Apps

Self-care apps are increasing in popularity as the world becomes more aware and receptive towards the mental health of people. People are seeking apps that can help them become more mindful and aware of their moods, sleep patterns, and potential anxiety triggers. Some apps provide guided meditations, daily affirmations, and other helpful resources. In addition, some apps could incorporate the ability to book a consultation session with certified counselors and psychologists. In fact, remote therapy is becoming more popular as people seek to incorporate regular sessions into their routines.

Home automation apps

A lot of automation apps have come up in the past few years to help people exercise more control over their home devices that are part of the Internet of Things. A popular goal among these apps is to help people save energy by providing data-driven suggestions such as when to switch off devices. People can also set up routines on these apps. For instance, you may want all lights to switch off or turn to a dimmer color at a particular time of night.

NS804 App Development

There are indeed multiple categories of apps that an entrepreneur can decide to build in 2024. The average person today has over 20 different apps installed on their mobile device. The app market is worth well over $400 billion and is growing yearly. Artificial intelligence, together with augmented and virtual reality, will spearhead the growth of the market over the next 10 years. To unlock this market, a business needs to build a truly world-class app that has a unique value proposition for the target audience. Picking the right app development partner is an important first step.

At NS804, we help our clients build their apps from end to end. The process involves conducting a thorough analysis to determine the viability of a proposed app project. We help clients put together features to include in an MVP given the resource constraints present in any app-building project. We have a well-skilled team to take on any project and execute it to world-class standards.

For more information about our services, reach out to us through our website today. A member of our team will be in touch for a detailed discussion.

The Most Popular Android App Categories in 2024