Apple’s App Store attracts 650 million people every week and is a good indicator of the most popular digital trends in the country.
Not surprisingly, in a year where inflation has risen and social media has changed dramatically, the list of most popular apps is a mix of discount online shopping, previously unreleased social networking and other navigation and communication tools.
Thus, among the ten most popular apps there are two Chinese apps that have been heavily criticized, namely Temu and TikTok. Cybersecurity experts raised Doubts about the goal real for these applications. Temu, a discount online shopping platform, is not profitable and even loses money every time a Canadian internet user makes a transaction on its app. But the app would collect data on its users, which, according to some experts, would go far beyond what iOS and Android, the mobile operating systems of Apple and Google, typically allow.
This data would have interesting value to outside buyers who might use it to track or better target North American mobile Internet users, these same experts fear.
TikTok, for its part, is an entertaining and perhaps mind-numbing social network that is not available in China. There, it is replaced by the Social Learning and Teaching Network. Many people believe that TikTok was created to distract young Americans and give future Chinese minds a competitive advantage in subjects considered essential to the national economy, such as science and mathematics.
Navigation app Google Maps, Google search engine, social networks Instagram, Meta’s Threads, WhatsApp, messaging app Gmal, and Microsoft Authenticator are also among the top 10 most popular free apps on the App Store in Canada in 2023.
In second place there is also a video editor called CapCut.
