A Bubble Chart of the World's Most Addictive Apps

I love admiring charts that try to use data to make sense of the world around us. This Bubble chart from Deedy Das, built on Sensor Tower data, plots how often people use each app against how many new users are still using it after one month. Bigger circles mean there are more total users.

Top 25 apps in the world by addictiveness and stickiness

Reading the two axes

How addictive an app is can seem like a random metric at first, but the farther right an app sits on the x-axis, the larger the share of monthly users that open it on a typical day. The higher it sits on the y-axis, the more likely it is to retain new users beyond that initial curiosity. Naturally, we should see a positive correlation here which we do see in this chart.

What stands out

What's really interesting here is that messaging heavy apps like Telegram, Messenger and even Gmail, mostly sit in the middle in terms of how addictive they are, while still being quite sticky. Messages itself is a bit of an exception with noticeably lower retention. WhatsApp, however, is the clear outlier with around 87% of its monthly users open it on a given day, and roughly 86% of new users are still active a month later.

Unsurprisingly, the top right quadrant is mostly filled with social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and YouTube that combine the communication/social interaction with a constant stream of content. Turns out, always having something new waiting when you open the app is a pretty good way to build a daily habit.

A lot packed in

The analyst layered many charting techniques that pack a lot of information onto this chart, like the colors identifying the parent company and the brand, while the gold ring means that the app has at least one billion monthly active users. In this case, it has made the chart quite busy and the user has to first read the footnotes to learn to read the chart, and then try to make sense of what is happening. This makes it a Discovery Chart, where if you're the kind of person that likes to see the data and make decisions for yourself, it's tailored more for you.

I like the decision to label the quadrants, with the "Habit + Retained" in the top-right and "Try + Forget" in the bottom left quadrant. That makes it easier to interpret, although the lower opacity text and grid lines make those labels easy to miss.