Social Networking, by the numbers

Facebook racked up 28,131,573 ratings in this category, outpacing WhatsApp Messenger and Messenger combined, which sit at 18,516,436 and 13,460,332. Those three names alone account for most of the weight across 15,868 tracked apps. Social Networking basically runs on free downloads: 15,415 of those apps charge nothing, 97.2% of the total, and only 450 apps, 2.8%, ask for any money at all. Paid tiers thin out fast the higher you climb: 179 apps sit between $0.01 and $0.99, 154 land in the $1 to $2.99 range, 66 fall between $3 and $4.99, 33 sit in $5 to $9.99, and just 18 charge $10 or more. Nobody's charging real money for a social network here. The money comes from attention and data, not from a checkout screen.

Ratings pile up unevenly, and the publishers with the biggest catalogs make that obvious. Create Community lists 104 apps and has pulled in just 41 ratings total. EKLESIA SOLUCOES PARA IGREJAS LTDA runs 74 apps with 2 ratings, Almashines runs 71 apps with 4, Evangelisch methodistische Kirche (SJK) runs 71 apps with zero, Bund FeG runs 68 apps with zero, and Yazo runs 64 apps with 2. Add up the top three of those publishers and you get less than 0.1% of all 113,647,970 ratings the category has ever recorded. Cranking out dozens of near-identical apps buys you nothing here. It won't earn a single star, let alone a following.

The apps that actually rack up ratings follow a pattern: communication beats discovery. Discord - Talk, Play, Hang Out holds 3,530,711 ratings, Google Meet has 2,332,568, Threads has 2,204,014, and Marco Polo - Video Messenger has 2,158,600. The fifth name on this list isn't a chat app at all: Life360: Family Safety & GPS has 3,034,558 ratings, putting it ahead of Google Meet, Threads, and Marco Polo. In this category, you earn ratings by solving one concrete problem, whether that's talking to a friend, joining a work call, or knowing where your kid is.

The median rating across 7,906 rated apps sits at 4.4, which looks solid until you check what's underneath. 4,216 apps hold 4.5 stars or higher, while 909 fall below 3.0. Those low scores belong to apps people actively dislike, not apps nobody noticed. File size tells a calmer story: the median download runs 66.8 MB, and most apps stay light, with 6,527 apps under 50 MB and 8,246 landing between 50 and 200 MB. Only 1,013 apps run 200 to 500 MB, and just 82 cross the 500 MB mark. Social Networking hasn't ballooned into a bloated category.

Maintenance looks decent on paper: 10,685 of the 15,868 tracked apps shipped an update in the last 12 months, leaving 5,183 apps untouched for at least a year. A lot of those stale listings probably trace back to the same small church-app and template publishers padding the app-count leaderboard, so the number makes sense. Publishers rarely bother pulling down an app that costs nothing to leave sitting there.

If you're picking a social app, these numbers actually tell you something. Price won't help much, since 97.2% of the category costs nothing anyway. Rating volume tells you more: Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, and Messenger didn't reach tens of millions of ratings by accident, and that kind of scale usually means the basics work. Scale isn't the only path, though. Life360 shows that a narrow, specific use case can out-rate general-purpose video apps. The real risk here isn't picking a bad big name, it's landing on one of the thousands of small, unrated, unmaintained apps sitting behind the leaders, the ones with 0 or 2 ratings and no update in a year.