When the App Store debuted in 2008, no one realized how it would fundamentally transform our relationship with the Internet. Thanks to the simple interfaces and easy downloads, anyone can seamlessly access digital content. Enter the era of endless music streaming, dating with the flick of a finger, connecting with even high school bullies as “friends” on social media platforms, matching little red beans thousands of times to That I can’t take it anymore
The 2010s may not have been the first decade to experience apps, but it’s the decade we all got hooked on. While it seemed like there was a new TikTok every few months, making it to the top of the free download chart, here are the 20 apps that changed our lives forever.
1
Coinbase
Established: June 20, 2012
What is it? A San Francisco-based digital currency exchange known for the brokerage of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
Why We Care: Remember that time in 2017 when the price of Bitcoin reached almost $ 20,000 each? And then it crashed quickly? The cryptocurrency hype cycle was exclusively from 2010 as it was so digital it almost made no sense. Cryptocurrencies became a thing for people willing to dump a ton of cash to raise virtual pets for a possible Ether. News and documentaries were wondering who the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, really was. Coinbase kept track of all of this history through its detailed cryptocurrency price log. It quickly became the base of operations for those early adopters looking to get rich quick through virtual currency.
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Established: May 3, 2009
What is it? A free service to send texts, photos, videos or gifs of cats; an application to make phone calls and video calls, as well as text messages.
Why we care: WhatsApp is the messaging service of the future, not only because you can connect with family and friends in different time zones, without interruptions, but because the entire service uses end-to-end encryption to prevent your conversations from falling into wrong hands. It is surprising that SMS text messages are still not secure, but at least there is WhatsApp as a backup for now. Looking ahead, we wonder when cell phone providers will adapt to the program and adopt similar technology by default.
3
Libby
Established: June 2017
What is it? An application to access the content of the digital library; the way cool kids borrow books from the library.
Why We Care: Listen, the library is great and we all secretly know it. But what’s even better is that the Libby app created and owned by OverDrive lets you borrow e-books, audiobooks, music, and more for free. Most decently funded public libraries are on this platform, so it’s worth downloading the app and entering your library card credentials to see if your hometown supports it.
Beyond loan titles, you can also place holds and your books are automatically returned (or you can easily extend your loan period with one tap), so say goodbye to late fees. And if you really want to up the ante as we move into the 2020s, Libby lets you export library content to your Kindle device for free if you hate reading on your phone screen.
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Uber
Established: March 2009
What is it? The first transport app; the epitome of Silicon Valley hard work, the spirit of playing a little too hard.
Why We Care: Before Uber, we still relied on taxis to get us from home to the airport and relied on friends with good impulse control to get us safely home from the bar. Once Uber arrived on the scene, those options expanded and drunk driving accidents dropped significantly. In New York, for example, drunk driving-related accidents fell by 25 to 35 percent between 2011, when the transportation giant moved, and 2017, when this City University study was published. from New York.
The company has since gone public, lost a CEO, and suffered multiple public relations crises, yet it remains one of the most valuable additions to our app list.
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Fortnite
Established: September 2017
What is it? A super addictive game that will gladly take money out of your pocket; the game that made your friends, children, neighbors, literally everyone, start doing a strange dance that looks like “The Carlton”.
Why We Care: Impossibly, nearly 80 percent of this decade didn’t include Fortnite (unless you were part of the development team), and yet it took full charge of youth culture in record time. Epic Games packed it with three different game modes, but the concept is always pretty much the same. Think: What if Minecraft and a first person shooter had a cartoon baby with really expensive customization options?
And if you still don’t know why children continue to perform that strange dance where they swing their arms, also known as dental floss, you can thank this game.
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Adobe Lightroom
Established: April 2014
What is it? A suitable photo editing tool for professionals; an expensive tool for editing selfies, if that’s your thing.
Why we care: Adobe Lightroom, itself, is not new. But accessing the best parts of Adobe’s pro-level photo editing tool was a big deal when it came out in 2014. While Instagram does allow you to select filters and adjust some basic elements of a photo, such as contrast and shadows. , Lightroom offers You have the freedom to do much more, such as professionally edit videos or photos and export them in whatever format you normally want.
It has definitely made life easier for the world’s photographers and videographers (but keep in mind that to reap the full benefits, you will need a regular subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud).
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Established: February 2004
What is it? A social networking website that is a one-stop shop for talking to long-lost friends and family, shopping, playing games; Hell to click on ads and spread fake news.
Why We Care: Facebook might have thrived in the latter part of the 00s, but things really heated up this decade with a backlash against Facebook-specific advertising strategies, a role in spreading fake news during elections. Presidential elections of 2016 and a massive data leak related to Cambridge Analytica, an IT service management company. Not to mention the depressed, outsourced workers who help flag bad content from countries outside of the US and live streams of murders, suicides, and pornography on Facebook Live. No matter how you cut it, it’s been a rough decade for Facebook.
And yet, according to App Annie, a San Francisco company that focuses on app market data, Facebook and Facebook Messenger were the two most downloaded apps of the decade. While Facebook should probably be archived as “worst apps of the decade,” we’ll just leave this one here for you to decide.
8
Google drive
Established: April 2012
What is it? The reason you no longer have to carry a flash drive with you 24 hours a day; A cloud-based storage system for your files.
Why We Care: There really was nothing worse in the entire universe than working on a Microsoft Word file and locking it before hitting “save.” Also, the cost of that kind of software? Exorbitant. And the alternatives before Google Drive and Google Docs, which are cloud-based, meaning they save your work, store files, and allow you to collaborate with coworkers or classmates, were horrible. Remember WordPerfect and all the wild format hoops you had to jump through? Yes, don’t remind us.
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Fabulous
Established: 2014
What is it? A helpful friend to establish better habits; A way to improve your body and mind that does not involve Gwyneth Paltrow.
Why We Care: One of the worst things to come out of the app decade is our apparent obsession with what everyone else is doing, fueled by social media. But with that wave of self-loathing and comparing yourself to others came a wave of personal care apps that allow you to track your activities, motivate yourself, and find community.
While the app used to be free, it now costs $ 13 per month (I’ve been using it for two years and I can confirm it’s awesome). For that price, you’ll get expert-based notes on how to form good habits and eliminate unpleasant ones, plus a place to log all your activity. It is great for both small changes, such as remembering to drink more water or improving your lifestyle, such as becoming a daily runner or remembering to read and feed your mind a little each day. Don’t you believe us? In 2018, it was voted one of the best on the App Store in the self-care category.
10
Venmo
Established: 2009; full release in 2012
What is it? A way to send cash instantly, while also allowing your acquaintances to see all the interesting and / or boring things you spend your money on. Verb: “Just come to me later.”
Why We Care: Never again should we worry about those awkward moments where we are stuck without cash in a split scenario of writing a check. The 2010s really turned into the cashless decade (at least for millennials and Gen Z) with the advent of instant cash transfers that don’t even take 1-3 days to process like your typical bank transfer. Of course, Venmo charges a fee of up to $ 10 for this instant money, but that’s not a hassle if speed is what you crave the most.
Venmo started the decade with fewer than 3,000 users after its inception at the University of Pennsylvania, but has grown into a massive Paypal-owned company forcing the banking industry to rethink everything that is known. And since this was the last decade that millennials came of age, it says a lot about their spending patterns: the need to split accounts two, three, maybe even four or five ways to make ends meet. month.
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DoorDash
Established: June 2013
What is it? An on-demand app for food delivery; a way to minimize the amount of human interaction required to grab some food.
Why We Care: Hello, Delivery Economy! While online ordering has been around for some time now, with GrubHub making its technical debut in the 00s, this decade has perfected the art of avoiding most human interactions in order to get a hoagie or some pizza. With competitors like GrubHub, UberEats, Postmates, and Seamless, almost every restaurant in your neighborhood has some kind of deliverability. This is because these apps have their own set of controllers, allowing small family stores to outsource that workforce.
12
Snapchat
Established: October 2012
What is it? A way to share photos and videos with short blocks of text, geotags, emojis, bitmojis and more; Previously, the best way to find out who was talking to whom, who was cheating on whom.
Why We Care: Even if you’re more of an Instagram stories type person, you have to admit, you probably used Snapchat before then, it introduced the whole concept of short instant clips to quickly illustrate people’s lives. And when you watch these videos, or stories, since Snapchat has been calling us to these select feeds since 2012, you get a kind of snapshot of your friends’ lives and what they’re up to.
And that’s the beauty of the whole thing. Snap was the first real innovation on social media in a long, long time (if we’re talking internet years), and you can see that legacy through the copycat versions of Facebook on your own app and Instagram, which you own.
13
Flo
Established: October 2015
What is it? An application to track your period and ovulation cycles; The best friend of a woman.
Why We Care: It shouldn’t be scary, taboo, or confusing to talk about ovulation or menstrual cycles in this age of health-based apps like Fitbit, Samsung Health, and Google Fit. There are apps for people with diabetes and even apps that will tell you about your genetic likelihood of getting a disease. With something as pattern-based as a dot, it makes sense for an AI-based app to control it for you.
Flo is just one of the vintage app offerings, but it does a ton of really useful things, like logging over 70 different symptoms you may experience to monitor for irregularities or potential damage; Expert quizzes and articles to help you understand what your body does; and even a calendar feature to help you know when the best days to conceive are.
14
NordVPN
Established: May 2016
What is it? A cybersecurity tool that helps you protect your data while using public WiFi.
Why We Care: If you don’t know what a VPN is yet, it’s time to brush up. VPN is short for virtual private network and it is one of the best ways an average person can mask their location. Think of it this way: it’s like you have a private connection that you can send between any device, anywhere. NordVPN is one of the fanciest options for use on phones and tablets and allows Android users to securely lock data on their phone while connecting to public WiFi hotspots that they remember are not secure. The app’s website even claims that the encryption is “military grade.”
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YikYak
Established: 2013
What is it? A place where college kids used to anonymously share quick posts about their college campuses; a now full of trolls.
Why We Care: Oh boy, we learned a few lessons from this app. First, we learned the power of anonymity and reaffirmed how terrible trolls can be. While the app was still active, college students basically used it to mislead people, even though YikYak expressly blocked the use of real names. But he also did some amazing things, like allowing people to express themselves and find community without risking retaliation; demonstrating the power of location-based applications.
YikYak was amazing when it showed the bright side of community-based apps, but pretty terrible when it came to the abuse of anonymity. RIP to the now-defunct application that we clearly couldn’t handle and definitely didn’t deserve.
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Wine
Established: January 2013
What is it? A social media app dedicated to short clips of six seconds or less. Noun: “Do it for the vine!”
Why We Care: Younger millennials will remember when Vine first came out because it marked the first time viral videos could unite a generation on Twitter (ironically, most Vine videos ended up on Twitter and you didn’t even need the native app for appreciating humor) Not to mention, this app gave birth to a full cast of modern YouTube and Instagram stars who found a way to monetize and ultimately make a career out of their Vine followers. We are thinking: KingBach, Lele Pons and Brittany Furlan, among others.
When Vine went to digital heaven in October 2016, with the exception of his archive, everyone went nuts. And while we still miss the short, hilarious clips, at least we have TikTok, now.
17
Pokemon go
Established: July 2016
What is it? An augmented reality application that allows you to catch Pokémon and face other players; a glorified walking app that also made augmented reality really popular for the first time.
Why We Care: Before Pokémon Go, augmented reality was more of an idea than anything the public actually used. But with the ability to find and catch the little critters on your phone, overlaid with what is actually in front of you through the camera lens, people really embraced AR for the first time, and it turned out to go out and walk in it. process.
18 years
Spotify
Established: October 2008
What is it? A music streaming service; The official end of the Limewire era.
Why We Care: Spotify came out in the last decade, but it made the whole concept of an unlimited cloud-based music library a reality during this decade, when it gained the majority of its subscribers. After illegal piracy became past, Spotify helped the music industry regain its footing, giving music labels small profits for each time a song is played. Without Spotify, we wouldn’t have any of the popular music streaming apps out there today, like Apple Music, at least in its current form.
19
Tinder
Established: September 2012
What is it? A dating app connected via Facebook and Instagram to prevent people from lying about their identity; a way to find the love of your life if you do not go over his profile after seeing a photo.
Why We Care: The digital world has made dating a whole new game. Or, at least, connect, which is mainly what is done through Tinder, the best application of this decade for that kind of thing. By making it ridiculously easy to bond with people and avoiding embarrassment (mostly) at the same time, Tinder made online dating that much more accessible. It also affected the experience a bit, depending on who you ask. Either way, “swipe right” is now part of our vernacular.
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candy Crush Saga
Established: April 2012
What is it? An addictive game that consists of matching rows of colored candies.
Why We Care: It seems like Candy Crush must have come out before this decade because it seems like we’ve been combining colorful jelly beans and other assorted sweets (sometimes even striped or wrapped) for centuries as we waited in the dentist’s office, sitting on the back. back of a car on a road trip or pretty much anywhere else to pass the time.
Since it came out, a group of users got tired of it, but without a doubt, older generations still love this game, leaving aside the little smartphone app for the tablet version. What’s partly horrifying, partly culturally fascinating, and a bit of a win for parent company King is that the game was actually turned into a live TV show hosted by none other than Mario Lopez in 2017. It only lasted a season, for obvious reasons. .
