Mashable
These are the fifteen best social media apps ever made for iPhone
It’s difficult to imagine social media without the iPhone.
Tho’ many of today’s best-known social platforms began on the web, the iPhone — by putting social media in our pockets — is what helped the industry explode.
This list is a look at our dearest social apps to ever grace the iPhone, based on our list of the best one hundred iPhone apps of all time. As with the rest of the apps on the list, we evaluated social media and messaging apps based on their design, cultural influence and how they resonated with users. The apps below are ranked in the order in which they appeared on the best one hundred list.
For a closer look at how we chose and ranked the apps on our list, you can read more about our methodology here.
The fifteen best social apps ever made for iPhone
15. FireChat
FireChat cleverly uses Bluetooth to permit its users to communicate with those nearby even when they don’t have a Wi-Fi or data connection. The app has shortcomings — off-the-grid private messaging may not always be instantaneous and massive anonymous group talks can quickly get unruly — but the app has proven particularly useful for activists who can stay in touch when other messaging apps can’t be relied upon. The app became massively popular in Hong Kong when pro-democracy protesters turned to FireChat to exchange messages when local networks were overcharged.
14. Highlight
Highlight was that flashpaper kind of app that burns super bright and then vanishes in a puff of smoke. Launched at the end of 2011, Highlight was in the vanguard of “near me” apps and also caught the most flack as being the creepiest app idea on the planet. At the time, there were a lot of apps willing to help you find friends nearby. However, none were as polished as Highlight. As for the creep factor. well, that was real.
The app used willingly collective location information to let you know when contacts were close, but the definitions of "willingly" and "contact" were fairly liberate. The app is still around, sort of, but thanks to Highlight and other location-tracking apps, we now know that we much choose to connect to people remotely via social apps like Facebook and would rather not be found in person, especially not by surprise.
13. Yo
The quintessential “dumb” app, Yo shortly captured the collective attention of the Internet when an app that only permitted you to say “yo” topped the App Store charts — even if it was for just a few days. The app quickly racked up more than a million users and inspired dozens of copycats (Yo Hodor, anyone?) while helping kick off a fresh trend of ridiculous and ridiculous-sounding apps.
For a minute, it seemed like everyone was attempting to recreate Yo’s success with apps like Shove for Pizza (a one-button app that delivered you a pizza) and Ethan (a messaging app that let you talk to a man named Ethan.)
Later, Yo’s creators proved the app was much more than a joke when they opened it up to third-party developers who commenced connecting Yo to other services. Today, you can use Yo to turn on your lights, reminisce where you parked your car, or go after your dearest sports teams, publishers and Instagrammers. There’s also an Apple Observe app, perhaps one of the few apps that truly makes sense to have on your wrist. Tho’ the app wasn’t able to sustain its early virality, it proved that “dumb” apps can have brains, too.
12. Meerkat
It was one of those moments where everyone seemed to be talking about the same thing. Perhaps it was because much of the tech press were all gathered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, but the influence of Meerkat during that showcase was real and fairly lasting. The app, which actually arrived just weeks before, kicked off the live, social movie streaming craze — fairly a feat since the app was kind of ugly and had an odd name.
Even with those handicaps, it became the app of SXSW, with everyone from journalists to CEOs were using it to broadcast their practices and engage with their audience in real time. Meerkat took citizen journalism to a entire fresh level as "reporters" were able to react to viewer comments, some of whom would direct where they desired the Meerkatters to point their iPhones.
No one spotted Meerkat coming, especially Twitter. Meerkat was using Twitter’s API to give users instant access to all their followers through the app (Twitter eventually shut down that feature). If you had a lot of Twitter followers, that made Meerkat instantly powerful. You could tell thousands of people that you were going live right now. It was instant gratification, on both sides.
No rise was more meteoric and none was shorter-lived. Twitter already had a similar app in the works, and just a few weeks later, it shoved out Periscope. The app looked better than Meerkat, but also felt somewhat incomplete.
In the end, however, Meerkat remains, but has lost its footing to Periscope. Will it get through? No one knows, but it will never lose its place as the app that put mobile-to-mobile movie broadcasting on the map.
11. Periscope
Periscope was not that very first, and primarily it was not the best mobile live-streaming service But it may be the social movie broadcast platform we recall. Possessed by Twitter and rushed out the door in response to upstart Meerkat’s instant rock-star status at South By Southwest 2015, Periscope looked like a better-designed version of its competitor, but with curiously different functionality (comments on Periscope don’t post to Twitter, for example).
However, with Periscope’s good looks, clever interface and heart system (a form of liking the movie stream by tapping the screen to add floating hearts, which stood in for Meerkat’s broadcast leaderboard), Periscope instantaneously put Meerkat on notice. The app has since improved significantly and seems like a somewhat more integrated part of the Twitter universe. It’s also becoming a verb: “Are you “Periscoping” this?”
Ten. GroupMe
It can be effortless to leave behind now, but there was a time when group texting wasn’t natively supported in iMessage. Good thing we had GroupMe, which made it possible for groups of friends to seamlessly communicate in one conversation. Better yet, it was cross-platform, so you could message friends whether they were on Android, BlackBerry or who-knows-what. Now group texts are part of iMessage (not to mention every other messaging app) so GroupMe isn’t fairly as relevant as it once was. But with advanced notification controls and built-in GIF search, it’s still one of the best ways to keep tabs on giant group message threads.
9. Timehop
Timehop’s nostalgia-triggering app launched on iOS in two thousand twelve and on Android in 2014. It pulls archives from your accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more to showcase you what happened on that same day in previous years. Thanks to hashtags like #TBT and #FBF, Timehop had no problem gaining popularity. In fact, it was such a winning concept that Facebook joined in on the blast-from-the-past movement and introduced its “On This Day” feature. Timehop responded with an April Fools’ joke by announcing the fake app Timebook, calling Facebook out for essentially stealing its idea. The app design is relatively plain, but it hasn’t switched much over the years. If Timehop wants to keep up with the times, it’ll have to find fresh ways to keep users engaged.
8. Path
Path aimed to capitalize on Facebook backlash by suggesting a comeback to the original premise of a social network: Just you and your friends, and that’s it — no games, no ads, no losers you met in a bar “poking” you. Path was the private villa to Facebook’s out-of-control pool party. The idea had merit, but Path was even more notable for its design, brandishing animated act buttons and orderly layering long before the concepts went mainstream with iOS seven and Google’s Material. Path’s premise was ultimately its undoing, however: By limiting the number of people you could connect with, it never achieved “the network effect” and was ingloriously sold to a South Korean Internet company five years after launch.
7. Snapchat
An odd little app launched in two thousand eleven with the name Picaboo, and it quickly became known for its signature “ephemeral” messages. A few months later, Picaboo disappeared and was reborn as Snapchat, and its signature ghost was on the way to being a starlet.
Guided by its youthfull cofounder Evan Spiegel, the app quickly took off with college students and teenagers who helped buoy the app from obscurity to the top of the charts in the span of a year. Its design was confusing and not intuitive at all — and suggested little guidance for newcomers — but all that was intentional, the app equivalent of a “no parents allowed” sign.
However its popularity with tweens is frequently attributed to their affinity for PG-13 activities, the reasons for Snapchat’s popularity are much more elaborate. (If not, then any one of the myriad of better-designed copycat apps would have unseated it by now.)
In a world where Instagram likes can dictate social standing and cyberbullying abounds, Snapchat was able to capitalize on its junior users’ need for authenticity. While Instagram is all about making a moment look flawless, Snapchat is about sharing whatever is happening right now — awkward selfies, blurry movies, bimbo faces and all.
It may sound like a puny distinction but it’s one that’s helped the app become one of the most-loved apps among notoriously hard-to-impress teenagers, an area that Facebook — for all its social-media might — has struggled with.
When Snapchat turned down what was reportedly a $Three billion suggest from Facebook, many onlookers were, predictably, shocked. But with a fresh media platform in Snapchat Detect, sponsored stories, geofilters, channels, and selfie lenses, the company has shown it has business smarts, too.
Even however Snapchat is now more popular, and more mainstream, than ever, grown-ups may never truly understand it. But that’s kind of the point.
6. Tweetie
When the App Store launched in 2008, Twitter apps quickly became a popular app category. The best Twitter client in those early days was Tweetie. How good was Tweetie? So good Twitter straight-up acquired the app in two thousand ten rather than attempting to build its own. Tweetie Two, which launched in 2009, wasn’t just a breakthrough as a Twitter client. It also created the concept of pull-to-refresh. Today, pull-to-refresh is fundamental to the iPhone’s user practice and has spread to thousands upon thousands of apps, including Apple’s own mail client. Not bad for a measly Twitter client. –
Five. Messenger
Facebook launched Messenger in two thousand eleven as its very first spin-off app. With group- and photo-messaging abilities and almost instant message delivery, it was a welcome, if not instantly significant addition at the time. Three years later, Facebook caught us by surprise when it shifted gears and made the Messenger app mandatory on mobile devices. The backlash was swift and intense — at one point the app was ranked No. One in the App Store with a one-star rating — with users complaining about everything from spectacle to privacy concerns.
But it was soon clear Facebook had much thicker plans for the app than messaging. Less than a year after the split, Messenger officially became a platform for other services, and the company is using the app as a launchpad for its fresh digital assistant “M.” Pretty cool for what was once a one-star app.
Four. WhatsApp
It can be effortless for Americans to leave behind, but SMS is a finite commodity in much of the world, where unlimited texting plans are nonexistent or prohibitively expensive. For people in those areas, WhatsApp — which suggested a prompt and reliable SMS replacement — was life-changing. It’s no surprise it topped the App Store charts in dozens of countries within in its very first year, even after its founders shifted from a free to a paid app. (It eventually became one of the most-downloaded U.S. apps as well.)
Almost six years and a $Nineteen billion Facebook acquisition later, the app truly hasn’t switched that much. Its design has always erred on the ugly side of minimalist, and fresh features are rarities. But all that is fairly intentional — it’s not effortless to make an app that’s reliably quick on the molasses-slow 2G connections used where WhatsApp is an essential part of daily life.
Three. WeChat
If you still think WeChat is just about messaging, you’re vastly underestimating the platform, which now counts more than six hundred fifty million users. Weixin, as it’s known in China, is the most superior social network in the People’s Republic, where Facebook, Instagram and many other apps are blocked. WeChat is where you go to pay bills, hail rails, play casual games, browse news, send friends money, and much more. Today, there are millions of “official accounts” on the platform which act as mini apps within the app, enabling users to interact with brands, services and even celebrities. Looking at what WeChat is to China, you can’t help but think this is what Facebook wants to be to the world.
Two. Twitter
It took a little too long for Twitter to produce an iPhone app. In fact, Twitter never indeed did. Instead, the company bought popular app Tweetie and built upon its platform (however it’s likely that whatever Tweetie code existed is long since gone). Today, the native Twitter client app’s utility and importance is unquestionable. Having a dedicated app that Twitter could concentrate on and promote helped Twitter, for a time, practice almost meteoric growth. With its tabbed interface and acute aqua design, it’s a rich app that highlights the best Twitter has to suggest, while it makes it effortless to detect the service’s newest features (hey, look at those Moments!). Twitter is now fighting to grow its user base, but there’s no question that little aqua bird and the iPhone have helped each other fly high.
1. Facebook
As an iPhone app, Facebook has had its ups and downs, but there’s no questioning its influence in app design. That “hamburger” you see in the top corner of many apps is truly just an analogue of the Facebook app’s old tiled navigation. Facebook was one of the very first apps to link directly with iOS — a hefty upgrade that let other apps more lightly log in with Facebook credentials, not to mention turbocharged sharing photos and movies directly from your phone.
The app used to be notoriously slow (due to a brief and disastrous flirtation with HTML5), but today Facebook provides one of the best mobile practices you can find, and fresh features like Instant Articles and 360-degree movie promise to take things even further. For many, without that white-on-blue “f” on the home screen, the iPhone feels naked.
Contributors: Samantha Murphy Kelly, Pete Pachal, Alicia Marie Sunburn, Lance Ulanoff and Christina Warren.
These are the fifteen best social media apps ever made for iPhone
Mashable
These are the fifteen best social media apps ever made for iPhone
It’s difficult to imagine social media without the iPhone.
Tho’ many of today’s best-known social platforms began on the web, the iPhone — by putting social media in our pockets — is what helped the industry explode.
This list is a look at our beloved social apps to ever grace the iPhone, based on our list of the best one hundred iPhone apps of all time. As with the rest of the apps on the list, we evaluated social media and messaging apps based on their design, cultural influence and how they resonated with users. The apps below are ranked in the order in which they appeared on the best one hundred list.
For a closer look at how we chose and ranked the apps on our list, you can read more about our methodology here.
The fifteen best social apps ever made for iPhone
15. FireChat
FireChat cleverly uses Bluetooth to permit its users to communicate with those nearby even when they don’t have a Wi-Fi or data connection. The app has shortcomings — off-the-grid private messaging may not always be instantaneous and massive anonymous group talks can quickly get unruly — but the app has proven particularly useful for activists who can stay in touch when other messaging apps can’t be relied upon. The app became massively popular in Hong Kong when pro-democracy protesters turned to FireChat to exchange messages when local networks were overcharged.
14. Highlight
Highlight was that flashpaper kind of app that burns super bright and then vanishes in a puff of smoke. Launched at the end of 2011, Highlight was in the vanguard of “near me” apps and also caught the most flack as being the creepiest app idea on the planet. At the time, there were a lot of apps willing to help you find friends nearby. However, none were as polished as Highlight. As for the creep factor. well, that was real.
The app used willingly collective location information to let you know when contacts were close, but the definitions of "willingly" and "contact" were fairly liberate. The app is still around, sort of, but thanks to Highlight and other location-tracking apps, we now know that we much choose to connect to people remotely via social apps like Facebook and would rather not be found in person, especially not by surprise.
13. Yo
The quintessential “dumb” app, Yo shortly captured the collective attention of the Internet when an app that only permitted you to say “yo” topped the App Store charts — even if it was for just a few days. The app quickly racked up more than a million users and inspired dozens of copycats (Yo Hodor, anyone?) while helping kick off a fresh trend of ridiculous and ridiculous-sounding apps.
For a minute, it seemed like everyone was attempting to recreate Yo’s success with apps like Shove for Pizza (a one-button app that delivered you a pizza) and Ethan (a messaging app that let you talk to a dude named Ethan.)
Later, Yo’s creators proved the app was much more than a joke when they opened it up to third-party developers who commenced connecting Yo to other services. Today, you can use Yo to turn on your lights, reminisce where you parked your car, or go after your beloved sports teams, publishers and Instagrammers. There’s also an Apple See app, perhaps one of the few apps that truly makes sense to have on your wrist. However the app wasn’t able to sustain its early virality, it proved that “dumb” apps can have brains, too.
12. Meerkat
It was one of those moments where everyone seemed to be talking about the same thing. Perhaps it was because much of the tech press were all gathered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, but the influence of Meerkat during that demonstrate was real and fairly lasting. The app, which actually arrived just weeks before, kicked off the live, social movie streaming craze — fairly a feat since the app was kind of ugly and had an odd name.
Even with those handicaps, it became the app of SXSW, with everyone from journalists to CEOs were using it to broadcast their practices and engage with their audience in real time. Meerkat took citizen journalism to a entire fresh level as "reporters" were able to react to viewer comments, some of whom would direct where they desired the Meerkatters to point their iPhones.
No one witnessed Meerkat coming, especially Twitter. Meerkat was using Twitter’s API to give users instant access to all their followers through the app (Twitter eventually shut down that feature). If you had a lot of Twitter followers, that made Meerkat instantly powerful. You could tell thousands of people that you were going live right now. It was instant gratification, on both sides.
No rise was more meteoric and none was shorter-lived. Twitter already had a similar app in the works, and just a few weeks later, it shoved out Periscope. The app looked better than Meerkat, but also felt somewhat incomplete.
In the end, however, Meerkat remains, but has lost its footing to Periscope. Will it get through? No one knows, but it will never lose its place as the app that put mobile-to-mobile movie broadcasting on the map.
11. Periscope
Periscope was not that very first, and primarily it was not the best mobile live-streaming service But it may be the social movie broadcast platform we reminisce. Possessed by Twitter and rushed out the door in response to upstart Meerkat’s instant rock-star status at South By Southwest 2015, Periscope looked like a better-designed version of its competitor, but with curiously different functionality (comments on Periscope don’t post to Twitter, for example).
However, with Periscope’s good looks, wise interface and heart system (a form of liking the movie stream by tapping the screen to add floating hearts, which stood in for Meerkat’s broadcast leaderboard), Periscope instantaneously put Meerkat on notice. The app has since improved significantly and seems like a somewhat more integrated part of the Twitter universe. It’s also becoming a verb: “Are you “Periscoping” this?”
Ten. GroupMe
It can be effortless to leave behind now, but there was a time when group texting wasn’t natively supported in iMessage. Good thing we had GroupMe, which made it possible for groups of friends to seamlessly communicate in one conversation. Better yet, it was cross-platform, so you could message friends whether they were on Android, BlackBerry or who-knows-what. Now group texts are part of iMessage (not to mention every other messaging app) so GroupMe isn’t fairly as relevant as it once was. But with advanced notification controls and built-in GIF search, it’s still one of the best ways to keep tabs on giant group message threads.
9. Timehop
Timehop’s nostalgia-triggering app launched on iOS in two thousand twelve and on Android in 2014. It pulls archives from your accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more to display you what happened on that same day in previous years. Thanks to hashtags like #TBT and #FBF, Timehop had no problem gaining popularity. In fact, it was such a winning concept that Facebook joined in on the blast-from-the-past movement and introduced its “On This Day” feature. Timehop responded with an April Fools’ joke by announcing the fake app Timebook, calling Facebook out for essentially stealing its idea. The app design is relatively ordinary, but it hasn’t switched much over the years. If Timehop wants to keep up with the times, it’ll have to find fresh ways to keep users engaged.
8. Path
Path aimed to capitalize on Facebook backlash by suggesting a come back to the original premise of a social network: Just you and your friends, and that’s it — no games, no ads, no losers you met in a bar “poking” you. Path was the private villa to Facebook’s out-of-control pool party. The idea had merit, but Path was even more notable for its design, brandishing animated act buttons and orderly layering long before the concepts went mainstream with iOS seven and Google’s Material. Path’s premise was ultimately its undoing, however: By limiting the number of people you could connect with, it never achieved “the network effect” and was ingloriously sold to a South Korean Internet company five years after launch.
7. Snapchat
An odd little app launched in two thousand eleven with the name Picaboo, and it quickly became known for its signature “ephemeral” messages. A few months later, Picaboo disappeared and was reborn as Snapchat, and its signature ghost was on the way to being a starlet.
Guided by its youthful cofounder Evan Spiegel, the app quickly took off with college students and teenagers who helped buoy the app from obscurity to the top of the charts in the span of a year. Its design was confusing and not intuitive at all — and suggested little guidance for newcomers — but all that was intentional, the app equivalent of a “no parents allowed” sign.
Tho’ its popularity with tweens is frequently attributed to their affinity for PG-13 activities, the reasons for Snapchat’s popularity are much more complicated. (If not, then any one of the myriad of better-designed copycat apps would have unseated it by now.)
In a world where Instagram likes can dictate social standing and cyberbullying abounds, Snapchat was able to capitalize on its junior users’ need for authenticity. While Instagram is all about making a moment look ideal, Snapchat is about sharing whatever is happening right now — awkward selfies, blurry movies, foolish faces and all.
It may sound like a puny distinction but it’s one that’s helped the app become one of the most-loved apps among notoriously hard-to-impress teenagers, an area that Facebook — for all its social-media might — has struggled with.
When Snapchat turned down what was reportedly a $Trio billion suggest from Facebook, many onlookers were, predictably, shocked. But with a fresh media platform in Snapchat Detect, sponsored stories, geofilters, channels, and selfie lenses, the company has shown it has business smarts, too.
Even tho’ Snapchat is now more popular, and more mainstream, than ever, grown-ups may never truly understand it. But that’s kind of the point.
6. Tweetie
When the App Store launched in 2008, Twitter apps quickly became a popular app category. The best Twitter client in those early days was Tweetie. How good was Tweetie? So good Twitter straight-up acquired the app in two thousand ten rather than attempting to build its own. Tweetie Two, which launched in 2009, wasn’t just a breakthrough as a Twitter client. It also created the concept of pull-to-refresh. Today, pull-to-refresh is fundamental to the iPhone’s user practice and has spread to thousands upon thousands of apps, including Apple’s own mail client. Not bad for a measly Twitter client. –
Five. Messenger
Facebook launched Messenger in two thousand eleven as its very first spin-off app. With group- and photo-messaging abilities and almost instant message delivery, it was a welcome, if not instantly significant addition at the time. Three years later, Facebook caught us by surprise when it shifted gears and made the Messenger app mandatory on mobile devices. The backlash was swift and intense — at one point the app was ranked No. One in the App Store with a one-star rating — with users complaining about everything from spectacle to privacy concerns.
But it was soon clear Facebook had much thicker plans for the app than messaging. Less than a year after the split, Messenger officially became a platform for other services, and the company is using the app as a launchpad for its fresh digital assistant “M.” Pretty cool for what was once a one-star app.
Four. WhatsApp
It can be effortless for Americans to leave behind, but SMS is a finite commodity in much of the world, where unlimited texting plans are nonexistent or prohibitively expensive. For people in those areas, WhatsApp — which suggested a prompt and reliable SMS replacement — was life-changing. It’s no surprise it topped the App Store charts in dozens of countries within in its very first year, even after its founders shifted from a free to a paid app. (It eventually became one of the most-downloaded U.S. apps as well.)
Almost six years and a $Nineteen billion Facebook acquisition later, the app indeed hasn’t switched that much. Its design has always erred on the ugly side of minimalist, and fresh features are rarities. But all that is fairly intentional — it’s not effortless to make an app that’s reliably quick on the molasses-slow 2G connections used where WhatsApp is an essential part of daily life.
Trio. WeChat
If you still think WeChat is just about messaging, you’re vastly underestimating the platform, which now counts more than six hundred fifty million users. Weixin, as it’s known in China, is the most superior social network in the People’s Republic, where Facebook, Instagram and many other apps are blocked. WeChat is where you go to pay bills, hail rails, play casual games, browse news, send friends money, and much more. Today, there are millions of “official accounts” on the platform which act as mini apps within the app, enabling users to interact with brands, services and even celebrities. Looking at what WeChat is to China, you can’t help but think this is what Facebook wants to be to the world.
Two. Twitter
It took a little too long for Twitter to supply an iPhone app. In fact, Twitter never indeed did. Instead, the company bought popular app Tweetie and built upon its platform (tho’ it’s likely that whatever Tweetie code existed is long since gone). Today, the native Twitter client app’s utility and importance is unquestionable. Having a dedicated app that Twitter could concentrate on and promote helped Twitter, for a time, practice almost meteoric growth. With its tabbed interface and acute aqua design, it’s a rich app that highlights the best Twitter has to suggest, while it makes it effortless to detect the service’s newest features (hey, look at those Moments!). Twitter is now fighting to grow its user base, but there’s no question that little aqua bird and the iPhone have helped each other fly high.
1. Facebook
As an iPhone app, Facebook has had its ups and downs, but there’s no questioning its influence in app design. That “hamburger” you see in the top corner of many apps is indeed just an analogue of the Facebook app’s old tiled navigation. Facebook was one of the very first apps to link directly with iOS — a massive upgrade that let other apps more lightly log in with Facebook credentials, not to mention turbocharged sharing photos and movies directly from your phone.
The app used to be notoriously slow (due to a brief and disastrous flirtation with HTML5), but today Facebook provides one of the best mobile practices you can find, and fresh features like Instant Articles and 360-degree movie promise to take things even further. For many, without that white-on-blue “f” on the home screen, the iPhone feels naked.
Contributors: Samantha Murphy Kelly, Pete Pachal, Alicia Marie Sunburn, Lance Ulanoff and Christina Warren.