The Most Popular Apps Of 2011

On Wednesday, mobile app analytics company Distimo released its year-end mobile app report. The top app across the seven biggest app stores? "Angry Birds."

Variations on the popular Rovio game nabbed three of the top ten spots, while "Talking Tom Cat" and "Fruit Ninja," in eighth and ninth place respectively, rounded out the other games on the list. Games make up the largest group of available apps across all platforms and are downloaded the most, reports TechCrunch.

According to Gamasutra, more than one one-fifth of Android apps downloaded since the launch of the Android Market were games.

The rest of the top ten catered to non-gaming pursuits and included Facebook (#2), Skype (#3), Google Maps (#5), iBooks (#6) and Twitter (#10).

According to TechCrunch, there are now over 1 million mobile apps available across the seven major app platforms, which include the Amazon Appstore, Apple App Store for iPad, Apple App Store for iPhone, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Even with all these offerings, Apple's app stores are still the big winners, reports Distimo. The top 200 highest-grossing apps in the iPhone App Store generated four times as much revenue as the highest-grossing apps in the Android Market. Apple's iPad apps bring in more than twice as much as the Android Market.

Much of this revenue is created through the "freemium" app model. Freemium apps are free to install, but then charge for extras that keep the game going, like paying to bring dead fish back to life in "Tap Fish," a freemium app recently taken to task on The Daily Show. As correspondent Aasiv Mandvi said during the segment "[T]hese games are free, up until you don’t want them to suck.”

According to Distimo, 65 percent of the revenue from top-grossing apps on the Android Market is generated by freemium apps.

Want to see more of this year's popular apps? Check out our slideshows of the top free iPhone apps and the top Android apps by age.