The top 100+ on-demand apps of 2024 (so far)

What industry grossed $185 billion in 2023 but is ballooning to a staggering $771 billion in 2032? You guessed it: the on-demand economy. 

Actually: no.

That’s just 1 part of the on-demand economy: transportation.

The entire on-demand economy is actually much bigger. We’re talking instant food. Instant alcohol. Grocery delivery. Transportation across a city, or transportation across a nation. A date for dinner tonight … a dogwalker for Max, a massage for you, flowers for mom, and someone helpful to mow the lawn or vacuum the carpets.

Pretty much anything you want, almost instantly available.

There are a million different things you can get in the on-demand economy, mostly from on-demand apps like Lyft or Wag or Uber Eats or GetAround, or Tinder. Pew Research says almost 75% of Americans used on-demand services pre-Covid … and the numbers have only grown since then. Given that, it should be obvious that this is not just over-privileged tech workers in expensive condos in San Francisco: this is a massive slice of society.

In fact, according to the National Technology Readiness Survey, 51% of on-demand customers live in the suburbs, while only 14% live downtown.

The rest: mostly rural customers in the country or small towns.

So what’s winning?

I took a deep dive into the global on-demand ecosystem, thanks to some data from Singular, Apptopia, Data.ai, and Google Play’s top app rankings. There are a lot of verticals to look at, including:

• Food & Drink
• Groceries
• Travel/Transportation
• Dating
• Chores/home services
• Flowers/gifts
• Healthcare
• Petcare
• Products (with same-day or even hour-by-hour shipping, pretty much any product can be available via on-demand mechanics)

You can’t focus on everything, however, so I’m going to limit the purview to Food & Drink, Transportation, Dating, and Home/chores, with a few exceptions and side excursions into some of the other categories. And I’m going to look at data that is global for most of the year so far.

So we should get some interesting names in with the ones that we’re familiar with …

Top on-demand food & drink apps

Here are the top 15 apps in Food & Drink on iOS and Android.

What’s immediately apparent is that iOS shows consumer activity in China, since Apple is still present there. Google Play, however, is not, so it’s harder to see Android install activity.

What’s also clear is that Delivery Hero is a massive company, with brands all over the world such as foodpanda, Talabat, Glove, and a stake in Rappi.

Food & drink	iOS	Android
1	饿了么-放心点，准时达 (Alibaba)	Zomato
2	Uber Eats	Swiggy
3	DoorDash	Blinkit
4	Grab	Uber Eats
5	McDonald’s USA	foodpanda
6	McDonald’s Global	McDonald’s
7	美团外卖 (Meituan take-out)	Zepto
8	KFC China	DoorDash
9	Subway	Пятёрочка: доставка продуктов (groceries)
10	Taco Bell	Domino’s
11	Crumbl Cookies	PedidosYa (food delivery)
12	Chick-fil-A	EatSure
13	Yelp	Talabat
14	Crumbl	Wolt
15	Luckin Coffee	Burger King India

What we can see in 2024 about the on-demand food & drink space is that this is a trend that has swept the world. Every country with a digital economy and significant smartphone penetration is participating in this.

The big brands like McDonald’s and Subway and Burger King are there, as well as U.S. on-demand leaders like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Of course, it’s not just food. Crumbl is delivering cookies, and on-demand alcohol is also a thing.

Drizly promises to deliver beer, wine, or liquor in under 60 minutes. (This could be dangerous.) Saucey and Buttery and Postmates and host of other players are competitors here.

Top on-demand flower apps

It might be more of a niche and there are probably fewer competitors, but you can (of course) also get flowers and plants delivered on-demand, and relatively instantly.

Flower vertical gorilla 1-800-FLOWERS shows its age whenever it says its name but has reinvented itself enough to offer same-day flower delivery. But it has a host of relative newcomers in the flowers-as-gifts department, many of which are on-demand services with extremely quick turnaround times.

On-demand flowers providers include:

• My Global Flowers
• The Bouqs Co (rated best overall by Forbes)
• UpFlowers
• UrbanStems
• Teleflora
• 1-800-FLOWERS
• FTD
• Venus et Fleur
• Farmgirl Flowers (fairly regional)
• Floom
• FromYouFlowers
• FloraQueen
• From You Flowers

Of course, why give flowers once when you can give them every single month? So yes, on-demand is an option, but so is the monthly box subscription model, like BloomsyBox.

Top on-demand transportation apps

If you’re looking for all the train apps (hello Europe, India), they’re not here.

While it’s a little challenging to sort out the most-downloaded on-demand transportation apps (thanks, App Store and Google Play for putting everything travel all together), for on-demand transportation we’re talking mostly about rides via cars and scooters.

Public transportation is there, but by its nature is not really on-demand … it’s available to everyone at precisely the same place and precisely the same time.

Here are some of the top on-demand apps on iOS and Android for transportation over the last 90 days:

Transportation	iOS	Android
1	Uber	Grab
2	Bolt	BlaBlaCar
3	Grab	Lime
4	Didi	Uklon
5	哈啰-骑车顺风车打车租车 (Hello)	Namma Yatri
6	Lyft	TaxiF
7	inDrive	Turo
8	Moovit	BiTaksi
9	Lime	Uber
10	Didi Rider	Bird
11	Go (Japan)	Lyft
12	BlaBlaCar	Didi
13	Turo	Voi
14	神州租车-随时随地 随需而用 (China Auto Rental)	Yatri Sathi
15	FREENOW	GCOO – Mobility Evolution

The usual suspects are present, of course: Lyft and Uber, which are massive in North America. But you also see the influence of Asia and Europe, with multiple Chinese car service and rental apps, and the ridesharing app BlaBlaCar from Europe

One other thing to note: it’s not just cars.

Whether scooter-sharing services are really a long-term thing or not, there are a lot of them. They’re fairly regional in many cases, and I do wonder if people download their apps more as curiosities rather than as actual dedicated and frequent customers, but the Birds and Limes of the on-demand transportation sector are definitely still a factor, especially in urban centers and vacation hubs.

Top on-demand home and chore apps

Whether you own a home in the sticks or live in a condo downtown, there’s a lot to do around the house. (OK, maybe more with a bigger property.) So getting some help via an app on your phone can be very handy. And, of course, fast.

Here are some of the top on-demand home and chore apps in North America. (I’ve narrowed these down from global since many of these companies only serve 1 or 2 regions.)

Home/chores	iOS	Android
1	Thumbtack	Thumbtack
2	TaskRabbit	Angi
3	Handy	TaskRabbit
4	Angi	Tody – Smarter Cleaning
5	HomeAdvisor	Leslie’s – Pool Care
6	TaskEasy	HomeServe
7	Jobber	آچاره خدمات و تعمیرات در منزل (Home repair)
8	Handy	Spruce
9	Jiffy	Home Outside
10	Urban Company	PINCH Job
11	Neighborly	Dolly
12	AirTasker	Handy
13	Houzz	Porch
14	HouseHappy	Needto
15	LawnStarter	TaskEasy

Your experience with all but the biggest services may be hit or miss, however. Many are regional, and many rely on local gig economy workers to deliver the services they provide (many also use trusted local professional for high-skill jobs around your home).

So YMMV, and checking the reviews of each service as well as the customer comments for each service provider is critical.

One thing that’s interesting: TaskRabbit is so massive that its worker app, Tasker, is bigger and has more downloads than many of the other services have in total.

Pets and healthcare and more …

There is so much more in the on-demand economy.

Who would have known, a decade ago, that dog-walking apps would be so huge? There’s walks, visits for lonely pets, plus boarding — yep, daycare for dogs — and even health care available, all on-demand. Walks often cost about $20 for a 20-minute walk, or between $30-60 for an hour, so this can be a lucrative option for people who have extra time, like animals, and like to walk.

(I fit in two of those categories, so this might be a retirement option for a little extra cash!)

Some of the top services include:

• Rover
• Wag!
• PetDesk
• Barkly
• Chewy
• 11pets
• Pawboost
• Fetch
• PetBacker
• Holidog

Vets say your dogs need between 30 minutes up to two hours of exercise a day, so if you’re busy but you want Rover to have a good life, this is what you do.

And of course, there’s more:

• Massages
• Deliveries
• Counseling
• Tech support
• And just about anything else that people need, and want quickly …

To the moon?

We’re not seeing a slowdown in the growth of the on-demand economy just yet. Smartphones taught us to expect results instantly, and we’ve transitioned that learned experience into the real world.

That means app publishers and entrepreneurs are finding more and more services to fit in on-demand models, and people with time and skills are providing the labor. Economist call it the “uberification” of our economy, and it’s not slowing down in the transportation, food delivery, and home services spaces.

The even bigger growth, however, might be coming in verticals that are relatively new to on-demand, like healthcare. Hitting almost a trillion dollars in just the on-demand transportation sector means there’s a lot more opportunity out there, in many different categories.