Top apps 2024: Music, Entertainment, Travel, Fitness, and Food
What are the top apps so far in 2024? We’re now most of the way through 2024, and it’s pretty clear which apps have the most downloads and which apps have the most revenue. So it’s time to go through some of the key non-gaming categories like travel, music, entertainment, fitness, and food, and see who’s coming out on top.
Before we do that, here are the top most-downloaded apps across all categories so far in 2024, according to Apptopia:
- Threads
- Temu
- TikTok
- SHEIN
- CapCut
- Telegram
- Snapchat
- Messenger
- Cash App
- ChatGPT
- Max (HBO)
- Monopoly Go
- Roblox
- Block Blast!
- YouTube
- Spotify
The top apps in most big categories seldom change, because it’s really challenging to outgrow the giants like Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, Spotify, or Telegram. But as you can see, newcomer Threads from Meta is doing just fine. And shopping apps for cheap imported goods like Temu and SHEIN are investing heavily in growth.
But it’s still hard. Just looking at music, for instance, Spotify has about 115 million monthly average users — 60 million daily average users — and gets around 180,000 new app installs every single day. And that’s just iOS … the Android version of the Spotify app gets about double those numbers.
Hard to compete?
Absolutely.
The reality is that with 14 million apps on Google Play and the App Store as of 2024 and 3,500 new apps every single day, it’s a very rare upstart app is going to come in and dominate the market in a category like Music overnight. It takes time, money, a great service, lots of luck, thousands of smart decisions, and ideally more than a splash of pixie dust. Just think: even viral sensation TikTok took 2 years to hit the top charts in multiple countries. And smash global hit Pokémon Go, perhaps the fastest-growing app of all time (260 million installs in the first 6 months) took 5 years to hit $1 billion in annual revenue.
Recently we looked at the top 50 mobile games.
Now let’s check out the biggest and most interesting apps in 5 key categories, using intelligence from both Data.ai and Apptopia and — straight up — some level of judgment between top downloads versus top grossing versus largest active userbase. All data is from the North America; we’ll have to do an EU and maybe an APAC version later.
We’ll check out these 5 categories:
Top entertainment apps of 2024 so far
None of the top 10 entertainment apps of 2024 so far are going to surprise you. Essentially, they’re all fairly well-known streaming entertainment apps from major American or global brands. Disney is doing well, as is Peacock.
| Top 10 apps in entertainment 2024 | |
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But so are upstarts like Crunchyroll, which bills itself as having the world’s largest collection of anime, and DramaBox, and ReelShort.
Max, the new HBO, now has a year under its belt with the new branding, and is doing very well indeed.
Some of the newer competitors working hard to make it into the top apps in Entertainment include some big names that are undoubtedly already huge — think Amazon and Netflix — but are maybe taking a break on aggressive user acquisition right now. Or, they’ve maxed out their markets to an extent.
| Top 10 next apps challenging in entertainment, mid 2024 | |
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What’s super-interesting here is an emerging and very successful niche-focused market for entertainment apps in 2024:
- Viki is for Korean and Chinese movies
- ViX is a big Spanish-language streaming brand
- The Zeus Network focuses on streaming media for the Carribean
Top music apps of 2024 so far
Look, we all know who the big players are: Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google with YouTube Music, Pandora, iHeart.
But there’s also a large number of significant players who aren’t quite as big: TuneIn Radio, SoundCloud, and some that you might not expect, like BandLab, which is a creator app for music and beats and shows up in the challenger list below. Tidal continues to do well also, especially on iOS.
| Top 10 music apps 2024 | |
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It’s always interesting to see how high Google’s (OK, Alphabet’s) YouTube Music ranks in Apple’s iOS mobile ecosystem, and how high Apple Music ranks in Google’s Android ecosystem. This year, Apple Music sits at number 4 on the Android list and YouTube Music clocks in at number 2 on the iOS list: impressive!
Note:
Apple Music doesn’t show up on on the iOS list because it’s preinstalled. Also many purchases of Apple Music on iOS are hidden inside omnibus Apple subscription packages like Apple One, which offers music, news, storage, health and fitness features, and more for one set price.
| Top 10 next apps challenging in music for 2024 | |
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Notice the once-massive name in music, Napster, showing up on the challenger list, as well as Deezer, and Audiomack. Apple’s Shazam falls off the list, but there are interesting new names:
- MuseScore offers sheet music
- LivePhish is an app just about 1 band, Phish
Also interesting: music-making AI apps are making a huge push in 2024, as you can see from slots 8 and 10 on the Android list, and 9 on the iOS list above.
Top health & fitness apps for 2024 so far
You wouldn’t be surprised by very many of the top health & fitness apps so far in 2024. Strava is well-known. Fitbit is a Google company and essentially the Apple Watch of the Android world. Peloton, Weight Watchers, Flo, and Noom are all, if not household names, nearly there.
AllTrails is an interesting app here. It’s for a very niche segment — outdoor enthusiasts who like to hike — but it’s one of the undisputed leaders in its space. Interestingly, Android users seemed to like hiking more last year; iOS users are spending more on AllTrails this year.
Apple Fitness+ probably should show up on this list, but all of its monetization happens via a subscription that is off the App Store … interestingly for Apple’s competition.
| Top 10 health & fitness apps 2024 | |
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The other big sub-category in health & fitness apps, of course, is mental wellness. Calm and Headspace are the heavyweights in that sub-category. The AI friend app Replika shows up in this category, but I made an executive all to exclude it. If you think I’m wrong — there is an argument that an AI friend could be good for mental health — ping me on Threads or Twitter and tel me why it should be included.
After all, everyone needs friends for mental health, and maybe — just maybe — AI can help with that.
| Top 10 challenger apps in health & fitness 2024 | |
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There are plenty of workout apps here for yoga and weightlifting, plus many for counting calories and improving your sleep habits. Also, note Epocrates, a reference app for medical professionals.
Top food & drink apps for 2024 so far
I had to go top downloads, not highest-grossing apps for the top food and drink apps of 2024. Most downloaded apps in the food & drink category are, I think, a pretty good proxy for the apps that are making the most money. They’re not perfect, because while McDonalds is tops in downloads according to Apptopia, the average Grubhub or Uber Eats delivery is likely to be higher cost.
But going with downloads seems like a better metric than revenue, because we’re not talking in-app purchases for food, unlike categories like games or streaming or health and fitness.
What you’re seeing here are massive fast food brands and big food delivery companies, duking it out for food and drink supremacy in 2024 and beyond:
| Top 10 food & drink apps, mid-2024 | |
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Note the utter dominance of the big three: McDonald’s, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, which eat up the top 3 spots on both the iOS and Android lists.
Crumbl, however, the cookie delivery app, is doing pretty fine for itself too.
| Top 10 challenger apps in food & drink 2024 | |
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An interesting top 10 app on the iOS list and top 20 on the Android list is Too Good To Go: End Food Waste. What does it do?
“In a world where 40% of food produced goes to waste annually, the Too Good To Go app is your ticket to unlocking affordable eats while helping the planet.”
That’s pretty cool.
Top travel apps for 2024 so far
As you might expect, there’s mostly big names at the top of the travel apps for 2024 so far.
Again, to get the apps actually making the most money, I think you have to ignore the top-grossing list and go for the top downloads list. The reason is simple: no one buys a flight or books a hotel as an in-app purchase.
Oddly, Uber is much bigger on iOS than Android, where it doesn’t even show up in the top 20 according to Apptopia data. Meanwhile, Airbnb is pretty big on both, and both iOS and Android users seem to be big American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta, and Southwest Airlines customers.
| Top 10 travel apps 2024 | |
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Car rental sharing economy brand Turo shows up on the challenger list, as does the U.S. government’s Mobile Passport Control app:
| Top 10 challenger apps in travel, mid 2024 | |
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As you’d expect, these list is dominated by major brands in hotel chains and booking services for hotels and airlines, with a sprinkling of transportation vendors and digital identity for travel.
Top apps: summary
Achieving a top spot out of the 14 million apps already on the two major global app stores and beating out the 100,000 new apps that show up every single month is a gargantuan task. So huge kudos to those companies — especially the challengers who aren’t from a multi-billion-dollar global tech company — who have managed it.
The one thing we know about mobile: the only constant is change.
Which means that top apps this year might not be top apps next year. And hope springs eternal for new entrants in all these categories.
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