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Jack Dorsey's Square makes the list.
Every six months or so, startup Zapier - rhymes with "happier" - releases a report on the fastest-growing apps of the year.
And Zapier should know: It's best known as a tool for connecting one piece of workplace software to another, automatically. For instance, to use a Zapier example, you could have every single e-mail attachment from Gmail copied into your Dropbox, and then alert you in Slack that you have a new file to review.
Nowadays, Zapier offers connections for some 1,000 apps, which are used by its over 2 million registered users. By looking at how people are actually using those connections, Zapier can get a pretty good sense of which apps are booming before anyone else. For instance, Zapier's January report saw an uptick for spreadsheet app Airtable; by March, it had raised a new $52 million round of funding.
There are two sort-of funny things about this new report, which encompasses the first half of 2018.
First, there's definitely a demand for chatbots after all. The conventional Silicon Wisdom these days is that chatbots were overhyped but ultimately undercooked, as users found them to be less useful as a more traditional mobile app or website.
Zapier The cofounders of Zapier.
Still, Zapier's report finds that Landbot, a startup that helps companies make chatbots, is the seventh fastest-growing app. Zapier CEO Wade Foster says that it's because companies are starting to figure out that they don't necessarily replace a website, but they can make it easier for customers to navigate one.
"You're starting to see some folks emerge and find some winning patterns," says Foster.
Second, here's a spoiler alert for the rest of the list: The number-one fastest-growing app, per Zapier's data, is Discord - a voice and text chat app that's mega-popular among gamers with over 87 million users. It's an unusual inclusion for Zapier, which sees the lion's share of its usage in the workplace.
Foster notes that chat apps are only getting more popular, and younger companies especially are likely to take the ones they're already familiar with. That, in turn, could help explain why Discord is seeing a big upwards swing on Zapier, and that could explain the future of the app.
"Chat is just a massive, massive market," says Foster. "I think more and more folks are finding out what works and doesn't work with chat."
The other reason could have more to do with Zapier itself, says Foster. As it gets bigger, it's finding success beyond its bread-and-butter
Here are the top 10 fastest-growing apps of 2018, according to Zapier: