After 31 days in the trenches of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge, Google Maps has emerged victorious!
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Check out the full bracket of contestants and winners embedded below. And if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments.
Where would we be without Google Maps? Well, we’d be wherever we are at any given moment, but we wouldn’t necessarily know where we are. Google Maps is simply a good app that has made life easier, and I’m proud of our readers for making such a responsible decision.
I’m not necessarily surprised that Google Maps came out on top, but the day-to-day choices our readers made during the tournament did keep me on my toes. When the bracket first kicked off, I predicted Vine would win. It created the template for a certain type of humorous video and didn’t stay around long enough to do any real harm. I was dead wrong. Vine didn’t make it out of the Sweet 16 and I think it’s probably a generational thing. Many of you likely never got a chance to even use Vine and other apps on the bracket that are discontinued didn’t make it far.
For me, the biggest twists along the way were Venmo defeating Twitter and Evernote taking down Spotify. Damn, you guys really hate Spotify. I was also shocked to see Instagram eliminated by WhatsApp. It is physically impossible to get an American to read any news about WhatsApp, but I guess it has fans out there.
My biggest takeaway from spending a month thinking about apps is that the App Store is pretty boring these days. The top apps aren’t all that different than what you would’ve seen years ago. The top paid game right now is Minecraft. The top free app is Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads. And in general, that’s the story of the whole app store these days. It’s mostly clones or iterative improvements on other apps. We’ve hit “peak app,” and it’s the end of history.
And that’s why we’ll never need to run this contest again. There will be no challengers in the future. So, congratulations to Google Maps, which now and forever will be the Greatest App of All Time.
