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Google's lightweight Gallery Go hits 50 million Play Store installs
A great alternative to the bloated Photos app
With Google Photos getting as feature-laden as it is, it only makes sense that people would turn to a less storage-intensive alternative. Google introduced Gallery Go for its less powerful Android Go phones about a year and a half ago, and it's already reached 50 million Play Store installations in that time.
Google Podcasts reaches 50 million downloads on Android, so someone is clearly using it
Podcasts only became a viable product over the last year
Google Podcasts may not be superior to many third-party podcast players out there, but it's free and readily available on any device and lets you pick up your listening session on a smart home speaker via voice. That alone might be worth a lot to many people, and it seems that Google Podcasts resonates with at least 50 million users — that's the milestone the app just reached on the Play Store.
Reddit gets its app to 50 million Play Store downloads, mostly by making the mobile web experience miserable
The third-party Reddit clients are better, by the way
Anyone who's tried to browse Reddit on their phone's web browser will be familiar with the constant popups prompting users to download the mobile app instead. Well, it looks like making their mobile site virtually unusable has paid off for the site, as its official Android app has just passed 50 million downloads on the Play Store.
Fitbit hits 50 million installs on the Play Store
This doesn't mean there are only 50 million Fitbit devices out there, though
Fitbit offers some of the most popular fitness trackers, and many people use the brand name to describe any health band. With that recognition, four iterations of the Charge on the market, and some ventures into the smartwatch space with the Versa and the Ionic, you should think that the company already got millions of devices into customers' hands. The Play Store listing seems to confirm as much — the Fitbit app has just reached 50 million installs over the weekend.
Android TV milestone: YouTube reaches 50 million installs on the platform
Hinting at how many users have tried Android TV over the years
Unlike the mobile Android operating system, Android TV isn't a subject Google often gloats about. Every year or so, we get a small hint about the platform's popularity, but no monthly active users or total sales units have been shared recently, or ever. This lack of marketing has lead many to think Android TV is close to abandoned, when in fact Google has been actively pushing the platform to vendors more than end users. In March, the company announced 160+ TV providers were using its OS. Now, we're getting another hint: YouTube for Android TV has just passed 50 million installs.
It may seem far in the past now, but the craze surrounding Prisma was extraordinary. It became available on the Play Store to everyone in late July 2016, around a year and four months ago. Now the photo-editing app has reached 50 million installs on the Play Store, which is no small feat.
We've covered Google's photo-editing app, Snapseed, plenty of times here. It's one of the best photo manipulation apps available for Android, especially considering it's completely free. If you needed more proof that the app is awesome, maybe the app's 50 million downloads will convince you.
It's not often that apps that aren't made by a giant company or preloaded reach a threshold as monumental as 50 million downloads, but TeslaCoil Software's Nova Launcher, everyone's favorite custom launcher, has gone ahead and done just that. That's seriously impressive.
Most of the apps that pass 50 million downloads on the Play Store are ones from major companies, but not this time. The newest app to join the 50 million club is PPSSPP, the popular open-source emulator for the Sony PlayStation Portable.
Facebook released a lite version of its Messenger application near the end of last year. As with most Lite apps, it's designed to be used in growing markets, where cellular data may be a limited resource. It's less than 10MB, works on Android 2.3 or higher, and has all of the essential features of the full app.
Of the two communication apps that Google announced last year at I/O, it's not a surprise that Duo found a larger appeal and better reception than Allo. It wasn't battling against existing juggernaut standards like SMS or widespread opponents like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and even at launch, it seemed like it did the basics right. The outcry over its missing features was far less brutal than Allo's and with just a few small changes from Skype and Facetime, Duo managed to delight and impress. Simplicity and immediacy are the reasons I, and many others, fell in love with it.
I know the subject of Twitter buying another company is not directly related to Android, but considering the importance of the social service in our day-to-day operations and the target of the rumor being TweetDeck, a crowd favorite when it comes to Twitter clients, I thought I'd give this one a mention.
While Google Maps already made headlines today for omitting the changelog in the latest update, causing hundreds of 1-star comments, it does have a reason to celebrate, which overshadows this snafu by a long shot. The 50,000,000 installation mark, never before achieved by any app in the Market, has been reached, and by none other than Google Maps, making it the most downloaded Android application ever.