Falling out of love with social media? The least popular apps revealed

Social media apps. — © AFP

There was a time when social media represented an exponential growth curve. Now the signs are that consumers are becoming more discerning and do not want to belong to endless platforms, It also appears that if a better platform emerges many are happy to abandon one platform for another.

This trend may explain, based on data relating to the U.S., why Instagram is now the most disliked app as 900,000 searching for how to delete app; and why 385,000 people appear to want to delete their Facebook accounts.

Recent research from privacy experts VPNOverview has revealed the “most hated apps”. Through this, data suggests that over 1.7 million people living in the U.S. searched for how to delete or deactivate the most popular apps.

The average person with a mobile device has 40 apps on their phone from social media, shopping, gaming to streaming. But are the days of this coming to an end? 

The study collected data through Google search volume and download data on the following points:

• Search volume for each state looking at terms relating to individuals who are looking to delete or deactivate each app.
• Number of users actively utilizing the app on a daily basis.
• Number of users downloading apps on a monthly basis.

This leads to the following ‘top ten’:

From the tabulated data, Instagram may boast 32 million active daily Android users across the last half of 2022, yet a total of 900,120thousand people had searched for how to delete the app. 

To support this, downloads for Instagram saw a decrease of 25 percent over the last 7 months, with a huge decrease of one million downloads in August 2022. July saw 15 million downloads in one month, compared to August which plummeted to just 14 million downloads.

Facebook has been around for nearly 19 years and hasan average of 57 million daily Android users per month in the U.S.It remains one of the most popular social media apps, yet in the past year, 385,410 people have taken to Google to search for how to delete the app. 

Similar to Instagram, downloads for Facebook saw a steady decline over the last half of 2022 with a 22 percent change in downloads over the past 7 months. September saw the lowest number of downloads with just 4.7 million.

In third place, download data for Snapchat is the clearest indication that people are moving away from the platform with a 46 percent decrease in downloads over the last 7 months. 14 million people downloaded Snapchat in June 2022, compared to just 7 million downloads by the end of the year. 

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are now some of the longest-running social media apps. So why are over 1.5 million peoplein the U.S. searching for how to deactivate their accounts? 

Christopher Bluvshtein, Privacy expert at VPNOverview explains to Digital Journal: ‘’Some people are also turning their backs on social media altogether. Whether due to politics, increasing cybersecurity issues, or even insecurity over those in a more fortunate position, there’s clearly been an increasing trend of people leaving these applications behind. People are burning out’’.

Bluvshtein  adds: “Recently, an interesting term came about known as ‘’doomscrolling’’ Essentially, this refers to spending excess time online reading negative news. There are a lot of problems in the world right now, and this kind of endless negativity can wear you down over time, so this could easily be contributing to the phenomenon”.