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It’s day 10 of Gizmodo’s March Madness challenge to choose the greatest app of all time! SwiftKey pulled off an upset yesterday, eliminating Telegram and advancing to the next round. Today, we have two apps that don’t get a lot of attention but have changed the game in their own way.
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic competition here. Check out the full slide of the contestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, give us a shout in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.
At 20 years old, Skype is one of the most veteran companies in our category. The application started at a time Long distance phone calls They were dying and their developers discovered a way to peer-to-peer protocols to make inexpensive voice calls over the Internet. By 2010, it had become the go-to service for video calling and had evolved into a sprawling network used for everything from business meetings to check-ins with grandma to profanity-laced gamer chats.
Heading into the 2010s, Skype began to face some stiff competition from startups like Zoom as well as giants like Apple. As its dominance declined, so did the novelty of video calls. Technology had spent decades as a sci-fi trope we thought we all wanted, and then the pandemic plunged us into Zoom hell and distorted the entire experience. But as we’ve recovered from the worst of that period, we’ve seen an explosion in enthusiasm for working from home and Skype has played a big role in making that possible.
Duolingo is the one competing with Skyle, and it kind of represents the entire ecosystem of educational apps. We don’t know if the various efforts to make learning in the mobile age were that effective, but they weren’t harmful, right? Most research seems to agree that using an interactive app like Duolingo is a great way to get started in a new language but you’ll need to immerse yourself in the real world if you really want to gain fluency. It seems safe to say that Duolingo has seamlessly helped millions of people learn to quickly ask where the nearest bathroom is in a new language right before a trip abroad. Along with the growing use of real-time voice translation apps, game-based language apps are helping us move closer to a world where we can all communicate on a basic level.
So what will it be, reader? Should Skype make it into the top 16 or will your aversion to conference calls automatically push Duolingo into the next round?
Greatest App Ever: March Madness Bracket Day 1
Greatest App Ever: March Madness Bracket Day 2
Greatest App Ever: Day 3 of March Madness
Greatest App Ever: Day 4 of March Madness
Greatest App Ever: March Madness Bracket Day 5
Greatest App Ever: Day 6 of March Madness
Greatest App Ever: The Seventh Day of March Madness
Greatest App Ever: Day 8 of March Madness
Greatest App Ever: Day 9 of March Madness
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