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As mobile usage continues to shape the technology landscape, business owners and entrepreneurs must know how their mobile apps can be successful. In this blog, we dissect the concept of an app category list to understand how one can choose the right category for app success, and the most popular app categories today.
There are over 2.2 million mobile apps on the Google Play Store, and roughly 2 million on the Apple App Store. These massive numbers indicate one thing: mobile apps are now an undeniable force in the technology landscape.
There’s no denying that mobile apps have transcended the boundaries of smartphone ecosystems. Between 2016 and 2023, the number of app downloads shot up from 140 billion to nearly 257 billion, proving just how valuable mobile apps have become.
Mobile apps are a part of our lives now, but the millions of apps existing today fall into broad categories that determine their existence and how users discover them. In this blog, we’ll go through what an app category means, its impact on ASO, the most popular app category list for 2025, and how to choose the right category for your mobile app. Let’s dive in!
In a nutshell, app categories are broad classifications within app stores, grouping mobile applications based on their intended use, primary functions, or target audience. Today, there is a wide range of mobile app categories on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, housing various types of mobile apps like shopping apps, game apps, lifestyle apps, finance apps, and more.
The significance of mobile app categories lies in their three-fold purpose:
While categories for mobile apps are meant to segregate applications, they also have a critical underlying purpose: ASO, a.k.a. app store optimization.
App store optimization is the process of enhancing a mobile app’s visibility on its respective app store. It works similarly to how SEO improves a website’s searchability, so it’s a major deciding factor for an app’s success.
ASO typically includes optimizing the mobile app’s key elements, like its title, description, screenshots, and keywords within its page content. Not optimizing these, especially the screenshots—the app’s social proof in most cases—often impacts ASO negatively, leading to lower conversions.
Choosing the right mobile application category significantly impacts the app’s performance on its store page, enhancing its discoverability and, hence, contributing to the ASO. Here’s a deeper dive into this:
Now, let’s take a look at the most popular categories of mobile apps in 2025:
Game apps continue to be the most popular ones on smartphones. On the Apple App Store, the games apps category reigns at the top, occupying nearly 12% of all the iOS apps hosted on the platform. This is no surprise, thanks to the immersive and recreational experience that game apps offer users. Their popularity is reflected in industry-high user adoption rates, with game apps predicted to each have a 26% user adoption rate in 2025 and over 30% by 2030.
For this year, the most popular games apps on the Apple App Store, based on the number of downloads, are as follows:
Meanwhile, on the Google Play Store, the most popular game apps include:
Closely related to business apps, productivity apps have seen a meteoric rise in popularity, fueled by the wave of remote work and generative AI. Productivity apps mostly comprise the following:
These apps are primarily designed to improve your daily activities with better task management. While some address repetitive tasks like transcribing audio or copy-pasting information, others help keep things organized, or take notes and make task planners. Occupying over 5% of all the iOS mobile apps hosted on the App Store, productivity apps remain among the most popular apps.
Here are the top productivity apps on Android:
Whereas, the top productivity iOS apps include:
With an average daily usage of 2 hours, 21 minutes, there’s no denying that social networking apps are some of the most popular apps for mobile users. From transforming marketing to becoming synonymous with our daily lives, social networking apps have come a long way and show no signs of slowing down.
While social media apps serve the primary purpose of staying connected, businesses are also increasingly using them to target niche audiences. These can be anything from sportswear brands offering apps for tracking health data and sharing within social channels, to apps exclusively for pet owners where they can share photos and updates of their lovable pets.
In 2025, these are the most popular social networking apps based on monthly active users:
Similar to how medical apps have become increasingly popular, there’s a significant opportunity for health and fitness apps as well. Over 86 million in the U.S.A. alone are using health and fitness apps, proving that anyone running a fitness business needs to go mobile. Generally, health and fitness apps include:
As of 2025, the top health and fitness mobile applications include:
With remote learning trends on the rise, the demand for e-learning and educational apps has skyrocketed. Their uses go beyond traditional universities and schools, with many people using educational apps to upskill, get new credentials, or even learn a new language. For instance, Udemy saw a 425% increase in online course enrollments after the 2020 lockdown. Similarly, Duolingo, one of the world’s leading e-learning apps for learning new languages, saw a 148% increase in monthly new users in 2020.
These statistics show that educational apps are quickly becoming popular apps, similar to mainstream categories like social networking and gaming. As of 2025, the top educational apps include the following:
With over 7% of the total iOS apps on the App Store falling under the ‘Lifestyle’ category, it’s hard to imagine that lifestyle apps wouldn’t still be popular in 2025. This rather broad app category caters to numerous types of users and their requirements—anything from wanting to wake up and check the daily horoscope to using an app to control the in-house entertainment systems. As such, it’s often the blanket term for more niche categories like dating apps, fitness apps, music apps, travel apps, drink apps, and more.
Currently, the top lifestyle apps on Google Play include:
The top lifestyle apps on the iOS App Store include:
Shopping apps have probably never been bigger than they are today. With over 5% of the iOS apps available today being online shopping apps, it’s clear that this category is popular and will continue to be so.
This is further fueled by the growth of e-commerce, which is currently estimated to be worth over a trillion dollars just in the U.S. alone. A major contributor here is what’s now being called the ‘m-commerce’ market, i.e., mobile commerce. By 2028, the m-commerce revenueis expected to cross $3 trillion, driven by the ease of shopping online through mobile phones instead of visiting brick-and-mortar stores.
As of 2025, the leading shopping apps include:
From the time you start planning your next trip until you return home, you will probably use a travel app to make the entire experience seamless. Travel is one of the most popular categories of mobile apps today, with apps that can help you find reliable ATMs on a road trip, discover offbeat restaurants, find last-minute hotel rooms, and more.
The global revenue of travel apps is set to reach nearly $2.27 billion by 2029, increasing by $0.6 billion (+36.5%) between 2025 and 2029. Travel apps are indeed popular and will continue to grow as more technology comes into play, transforming how users travel and optimize their travel plans using such apps.
As of 2025, the top travel apps include:
The rise of social media automatically translated to entertainment apps becoming mainstream, with people wanting to engage in video browsing and viewing movies and television shows. Additionally, mobile usage has surged in recent years, with nearly 62% of the world’s internet traffic coming from mobile phones. Hence, it’s almost inevitable that entertainment is one of the most popular categories of mobile apps. Going by the number of downloads, the entertainment category held the top spot on the Apple App Store in 2024, with 128+ million app downloads.
The top entertainment apps on the Google Play Store are:
Meanwhile, the top entertainment iOS apps include:
Mobile apps have also transformed how news consumption occurs today. While people relied on TV news channels, most consumers have shifted to mobile applications. Nearly 82% of American adults get news from apps, and over 68% directly access news from mobile apps. The COVID pandemic seemingly accelerated this adoption, with the US seeing a 104% increase in daily sessions with mobile news applications during the initial months.
Today, the mobile news app market is primarily occupied by online news aggregators like Apple News and Google News, with a few prominent traditional brands like The New York Times and CNN also in the mix. Here are the top news and magazines mobile apps:
Falling along the same lines as finance apps, mobile banking apps are primarily focused on banking customers to manage their finances. Through banking apps, you can make various transactions just from your smartphone, access your bank account, and utilize other services or products as provided by the bank. In a nutshell, it’s banking on the go, which is why banking apps are a popular category, with 2024 seeing over 70 million banking app downloads.
Currently, the leading mobile banking apps are:
Gone are the days when businesses relied on pen and paper—or computer screens for that matter—to conduct business. The advent of mobile technology has also permeated the business landscape, with companies increasingly relying on apps for seamless operations, from conducting meetings to recruiting top talent. In the U.S., the mobile application market is estimated to grow at 14.1% CAGR by 2030, majorly fueled by businesses leveraging mobile apps.
As of 2025, the top business apps on Android include:
Meanwhile, the top business apps on iOS include:
Streaming has completely transformed how we listen to music today, primarily through mobile apps and software applications. Streaming revenues have increased astronomically in the last decade, from nearly $2 billion in 2014 to almost $15 billion in 2024, proving streaming’s popularity as a pastime for music fans. It’s permeating social networking, as people share their favorite tracks, integrate music in their social media posts, and even create music to post online.
As of 2025, the top iOS music apps include:
The top Android music apps include:
The social media wave has also boosted the popularity of photography apps, as people increasingly use them to click and edit pictures, whether for posting online or as a hobby or profession. With 6.5 billion downloads in 2024, it’s safe to say that photography is a highly popular category for mobile applications.
Currently, the leading photography mobile apps include:
When we talk about social networking, it’s hard not to consider it synonymous with mobile messaging. Billions of mobile users access OTT (over-the-top) messaging apps to communicate, with approximately 3.5 billion in 2025. Mobile messaging apps have transformed communication, from how we talk amongst our social circles to how businesses communicate with their audiences.
Based on monthly active users, the most popular mobile messaging apps include:
While not the most exciting, utilities is a popular mobile app category because everyone has utilities apps on their phones—at least one. While some may use these sparingly, many use such apps to simplify daily tasks and often use them without even knowing. For example, you may install a VPN and often use it for streaming or work purposes without even knowing that it’s operating daily. Statistics further solidify this popularity, with utilities apps having over 121 million downloads in 2024.
Currently, the top utilities apps include:
Like utility apps, weather apps aren’t the most glorious things on the app stores, but that doesn’t undermine their significance. These apps help us plan our daily lives and also provide timely forecasts, which is of utmost importance during extreme weather conditions. As such, users increasingly depend on weather apps, with a 2023 survey showing 30% of respondents dependent on these apps for weather forecast information.
The top weather apps currently include:
Similar to photography apps, video apps also form a significantly popular app category, driven by social media trends. Whether you want to do video editing or simply capture videos to share with friends and family, these apps are part of the tech solar system surrounding our lives, and as technology evolves, so will they. Back in 2023, video apps saw over 3 billion downloads and were one of the leading mobile app categories, and their popularity has been rising ever since.
In 2025, the most popular video and video editing apps include:
Whether you need to explore a city or check the on-road traffic while heading to the countryside, you know that navigation apps will be your best friend. As such, their importance in navigation and traveling has made mapping apps highly popular, with Google Maps being one of the most popular Google-owned mobile apps in recent years.
Currently, the leading navigation apps include:
While banking apps are exclusively for bank accounts, finance apps are for the broader requirement of diverse financial needs, like asset management, personal finance management, and mobile banking. Finance apps are quickly gaining popularity, proven by the fact that they occupy 4.3% of the total iOS apps on the App Store. This is also due to the growing fintech market and an increasing number of people using mobile apps to manage their finances. In 2020, finance apps witnessed a 90% spike in install market share globally, their biggest yet.
The top finance apps include:
Popular apps will ultimately boil down to choosing the right app category, bolstering its ASO and bringing it to the front lines. Here are a few key steps to consider when selecting the category for your apps:
Mobile apps are undoubtedly an excellent way to ensure business expansion and higher ROIs. However, you can do these right when you start strong, and the best way to do so is by targeting the right app category. As you can already see, certain categories are outshining others due to recent trends amongst mobile users. Now, what will truly separate the best business owners and entrepreneurs from the average is leveraging these numbers and choosing categories accordingly.
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