Snapchat-parent Snap owns the fourth-most popular app on the App Store, which, like Instagram, is a mobile-only app based around the camera, allowing users to post photos with different lenses and record video that's collected into stories. As long as people are using their phones to communicate, Facebook should remain a winner.

In its most recent quarter, 89% of its advertising revenue came from mobile, and it's leveraged that expertise to build businesses out of native app brands like Instagram - and should eventually do the same with Whatsapp. While mobile gave the company headaches in its early public history, it has now mastered mobile advertising, which has become the primary driver of its business. The social media giant owns three of the top five apps in the app store, and has three apps with a billion users or more, with Instagram likely to become the fourth sometime this year. No one dominates the app game like Facebook. The company does not break out YouTube financial results, but the high monetization rate of video ads makes that another valuable revenue stream.

YouTube, for example, has 1.5 billion monthly users, and claims that its users watch more than an hour a day on mobile devices. Android apps collected $27 billion in sales in 2016, and like Apple the company keeps 15% of app-based sales, giving it a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream. Outside of Android, Alphabet also owns some of the most popular apps in the world, including YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs, which have burnished its advertising business. With its Android platform, Alphabet has built out its own impressive app-driven business. Increasingly, Apple's focus has been leveraging its installed base of devices to grow its services business through in-app purchases and tangential business like Apple Music, iTunes, and its expected upcoming television service. In the most recent quarter, services revenue, which is derived largely from in-app payments and its own apps like Apple Music, increased 34% from the previous year to $8.5 billion, making it the company's largest segment after the iPhone. #1,#2, #5, #18 (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, What's App)Īs the king of the App Store, Apple has made quite a killing from the mobile economy. #3, #7, #9, #14, and more (YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs)

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