Yuka KatoHumans have been communicating with one another just fine for a long, long time. So when new technology comes along to update the way we communicate, it needs to be frictionless, affordable and appealing to become ‘normal.’
Over the past three decades, some tech brands have become more adept than others at identifying and/or creating a market for such paradigm-changing ideas. But which communication apps currently hit that sweet spot of functionality and desirability?
Mailsuite analyzed the 5-star user rating breakdowns for nearly 1,500 top communications and social media apps on Google Play Store to rank the email, messaging and social media apps users rate the highest in every country — and the ones that are falling short.
Key findings
- Microsoft Outlook is the highest-rated email app in 46 countries, including Mexico, Ireland, Denmark, Italy, South Africa and the Philippines. In the U.S., Yahoo Mail took the lead as America’s most loved email app.
- Gmail is the email app with the lowest user ratings in 36 countries — the list includes the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Brazil, Ireland, Spain and Poland.
- Facebook rose to the top as the most hated social media app in 39 countries, including the UK, Australia, Canada, France and India.
- Google Messages is the most-loved messaging app in 22 countries, including Australia, Canada and the UK.
The Highest (And Lowest) Rated Email Apps in Every Country
Microsoft Outlook is the top-rated email app in 46 countries. Outlook first appeared as part of Office 97, with Microsoft later buying the Acompli email app in 2014 and transforming it into the Outlook mobile app the following January.
This late entry into the game meant that Microsoft could build on previous attempts: “Outlook is trying to perfect rather than reinvent email apps,” said a Slate review at the time, “and this means you’ll spend more time getting things done instead of learning a new system. Combine that with some of the new features, and most people will be more than happy with how Microsoft imagines modern email.”
The U.S., Australia and Japan are among nine countries that like Yahoo Mail the best. Yahoo was founded as a web directory in 1994, and the company acquired RocketMail and transformed it into its free email service in 1997, announcing the Beta version of its mobile app in 2010. Today, the Yahoo Mail app has 7.22 million reviews on Google Play, with an average rating of 4.5 stars.
The dominance of Gmail was a key motivation for Yahoo Mail’s development through the 2000s. Today, Google’s product eclipses Yahoo Mail with 10 billion downloads to Yahoo’s 100 million+. However, Gmail is the world’s most hated email app in 36 countries. Its only main competitor to that title is AOL Mail, which has the lowest reviews in 22 countries.
Places that rate Gmail lower than any other mail app include the U.S., Brazil and Ireland. Google launched the app in 2006, just two years after Gmail itself appeared. However, Google has regularly tinkered with the program to better promote and integrate the company’s broader interests and applications. In 2023, the increased visibility of ads and promoted content across the Gmail service drew ire from users.
With around 20% of the world’s population using Gmail (around 1.8 billion users), its massive user base could naturally lead to more negative reviews. However, it remains a popular choice as it is free to use, has an aggressive and accurate spam filter and boasts thousands of easily installable integrations that can help you boost your productivity and customise the app in whatever way you see fit.
The Highest (And Lowest) Rated Messaging Apps in Every Country
MIT’s Computation Center produced arguably the first ‘instant messaging’ (IM) program as a feature of its Compatible Time-Sharing System in 1961, allowing users on hundreds of remote dial-up terminals to send files and real-time messages to each other. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has connected people on the net since 1988, but AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) popularized the idea of instant messaging with contact lists in a consumer context. By 2006, AIM had 53 million users, more than the combined users of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google’s IM services.
Indeed, Google has struggled to get its IM game together, producing more than 12 new messaging services over the 15 years from 2006–2021. However, Telegram is today the most loved messaging app in 17 countries, including United Kingdom and Portugal. This makes it second only to Signal Google Messages, the top-rated IM app in 22 countries, including United States and the India.
Discord is the most hated IM app in 32 countries, fewer only than the combined countries of Messenger (25) and WhatsApp Business (14). (Note that Plus Messenger is not a Meta service but an ‘unofficial’ Telegram client with over 40 million downloads.)
The Discord app is the most hated app in the U.S. and Canada, among others. Discord gave the app a major overhaul at the end of 2023, with their product manager, Francesco Polizzi, admitting that “[o]ver time, the amount of *stuff* that Discord can do has grown exponentially. And yet, the mobile app was forced to just shove it all in a tiny version of the desktop app.” However, user criticism was vocal: “shoutout to the tabletop shop employee who saw my Discord staff hoodie, powerwalked up, and immediately brought up the mobile app,” wrote one company blogger.
The Highest (And Lowest) Rated Social Media Apps in Every Country
In 2010, Instagram breathed new life into the social media phenomenon that had barely matured at that point. As the first iOS social media app and first mobile-only platform, Instagram climbed on the shoulders of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr, all of which had been launched or made available to the general public over the previous five years. Instagram built a userbase of 10 million users in its first year and overtook TikTok to become the app with the world’s most downloads for 2023, but it still failed to win the ‘most loved social media app’ in any country according to our metrics.
The plaudits go to TikTok, the most loved social media app in 30 countries, including the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Launched internationally in September 2017 and with over 1 billion downloads on Playstore and over 80 million reviews (Playstore and Appstore combined), TikTok quickly became one of the most influential social media apps in recent years.
However, Instagram or Instagram Lite are the most hated apps in Algeria, Oman, and Jordan, while the app’s Meta stablemates, Facebook and Facebook Lite, are the most hated apps across 30 countries. Meta newcomer Threads is most hated in Greece and Hong Kong. “[A]ny social media app aiming to succeed financially must capitalize on the worst aspects of social behavior,” says the New York Times review of Threads. “…Threads, it turns out, is just another battlefield.”
But the most hated social media app of all is, perhaps appropriately, the “front page of the internet”: Reddit. The content-sharing site was a straggler to the app realm, undergoing a major renovation to become usable on mobile browsers in 2010 and finally buying up third-party Reddit reader Alien Blue in 2014 and rebranding it as the official Reddit mobile app. Reddit updated the app’s conversation navigation and loading times in April 2024, following widespread criticism that the app was slow and unintuitive to use.
Design for Life
Apps have become an integral part of daily life in much of the world — it’s impossible or inexpedient to keep up with office work, personal banking or remote communication without them. But it’s all too easy for developers to take this dependency for granted; while the best apps are lovingly maintained with the user in mind, others are left wanting for updates or become overcomplicated to preempt competitor products.
For now, however, the app form and the smartphone have become inseparable buddies, to the extent that it’s hard to imagine an alternative way of completing many of the tasks for which they’re designed. And so, the tech giants and upstarts will continue to innovate, with one eye on user needs and the other on developments such as AI, with whatever communication formats that may bring.
Methodology
To determine the email, messaging and social media apps with the highest and lowest ratings in every country on the Google Play Store, we began by compiling a list of SimilarWeb’s top 50 communications and social media apps for each country. Our seed list included 1,493 apps in total.
Next, we retrieved the Google Play Store rating breakdowns for all apps on our list in each country before calculating the precise 5-star rating for all apps in order to crown the highest and lowest rated by category in each country.
This data was collected and analyzed at the end of June 2024.
