The Gizmodo March Madness Challenge is in its tenth day to name the greatest apps of all time! SwiftKey was unexpectedly upset yesterday, eliminating Telegram and advancing to the next round. Today, we have two apps that don’t get a lot of attention, but are game-changing in their own way.
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all of our selection criteria for this historic match right here. Check out the full list of contestants embedded below. As always, if you think we’ve missed your personal favorite app, give us a shout in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.
Skype is 20 years old and one of the most experienced veterans on our team.The time the application started Long-distance call As they drew their last breaths, its developers found a way to make cheap online voice calls via a peer-to-peer protocol. By the 2010s, it became the go-to service for video calls and grew into a massive network used for everything from business meetings to checking in with grandma to expletive-filled gamer chats.
As the 2020s approach, Skype begins to face stiff competition from upstarts like Zoom and giants like Apple. As its dominance wanes, so does the novelty of video calls. For decades, the technology was treated as the sci-fi trope we all wanted, and then the pandemic plunged us into Zoom hell and tainted the entire experience. But as we recover from the worst of that period, we’re seeing a surge in enthusiasm for working from home, and Skype has been instrumental in making that happen.
Duolingo competes with Skyle and represents our entire education app ecosystem. We don’t know if various efforts to gamify learning in the mobile era are effective, but it never hurts, right? Most research seems to agree that using interactive apps like Duolingo is a great way to start learning a new language, but if you really want to gain fluency, you’ll need to immerse yourself in the real world. It’s safe to say that Duolingo has seamlessly helped millions of people quickly learn to ask where the nearest bathroom is in a new language before traveling abroad. Combined with the increasing use of real-time translation audio apps, gamified language apps are helping us get closer to a world where we can all communicate at the most basic level.
So, reader, what would it be? Should Skype make the top 16, or will your dislike of conference calls automatically push Duolingo into the next round?
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Greatest Apps Ever: March Madness Bracket Day 5
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Greatest Apps Ever: March Madness Bracket Day 9