Nielsen: 2016's top mobile apps by monthly uniques are Facebook up 14% YoY to 146M, Messenger up 28% to 129M, YouTube up 20% to 113M; Amazon rose 43% to 65M
Mobile applications from Facebook and Google dominated the new list of the year's top apps released today by Nielsen.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second straight year Nielsen has crowned Facebook, and the 2016 numbers extend an arc the coverage has been tracking since 2015: that year's Nielsen ranking already flagged Messenger as the fastest-growing app, and ComScore had watched Messenger displace YouTube as the number-two US app once smartphone penetration hit 77%. The new list confirms the pattern — Messenger's 28% growth again outpaces both its parent and YouTube.
The reason the table matters beyond bragging rights is what it measures: monthly reach, not engagement. It freezes a snapshot of the Facebook-Google duopoly at peak simplicity — two Facebook apps and one Google app atop the chart — just before later measurement showed the two companies' trajectories diverging.
First-order effects
- Facebook holds #1 at 146M monthly uniques (+14%), but Messenger's +28% to 129M makes it the growth engine again, closing the gap on the parent app and validating the standalone-messaging bet.
- Amazon's +43% to 65M uniques lands it in the top 10, meaning its shopping app now reaches a base growing faster than any of the social leaders above it.
Second-order effects
- For Facebook, the faster-growing asset being a separate app means its reach story increasingly runs through Messenger — the messaging surface ComScore saw overtake YouTube becomes the company's main expansion vector as the flagship's growth settles to 14%.
- For Google, YouTube's 20% climb to 113M uniques understates its position: the app sits inside a broad portfolio, which pressures rivals competing app-by-app rather than across a suite.
Third-order effects
- The divergence the corpus later documents was visible here: by 2021, Comscore's tally showed Google's share of the top 15 US apps rising from 33% to 46% since 2015 while Facebook held flat at 20% — single-app giants plateau, portfolios compound.
- Reach-based rankings also age poorly: YouTube carried 37% of all US mobile internet traffic by 2019 against Facebook's 8.4%, so uniques tables like Nielsen's increasingly miss where mobile time actually goes.
The trend: US mobile reach is consolidating into a few platform portfolios, with Google's multi-app breadth compounding past Facebook's two-app core as tracked by Nielsen and Comscore.