The Greatest App of All Time Day 6: YouTube vs. Words With Friends

It’s day 6 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time and things are heating up. Thus far in the competition, we’ve had some huge apps taking on smaller or even defunct players and the tech giants swept every round. But yesterday, Vine came from behind and crushed Snapchat with 67 percent of the vote. Can Words With Friends pull off a similar upset against YouTube in this round?

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 constestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.

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With 2.5 billion monthly active users and a lot of goodwill, YouTube is likely one of the most formidable nominees in our bracket. In 2005, the company arguably invented online video as we know it. The first video that was uploaded to the platform, Me at the Zoo, depicted YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of some elephants while making some basic comments about elephants for 19 seconds. It signaled a new world in which people could broadcast even the most banal clips to billions of people.

And to this day, there is no shortage of useless, unnotable footage to be found on YouTube. But with its revenue share program, YouTube practically defined what it means to be an online influencer and users like Mr. Beast create videos that cost millions of dollars. People use YouTube as their only music streamer (and the platform probably gets away with more piracy than any other). It’s also become a paid broadcast television platform and a babysitter for millions of kids with an iPad. And for better or worse, it has become a place where many people get the majority of their news, resulting in the unfortunate spread of misinformation time and time again.

Most of the criticisms of YouTube’s existence could be said of other social platforms, but few of them feel as essential to the infrastructure of the internet. It is simply the video platform. If you’re watching an embedded video, it is probably hosted on YouTube. TikTok is making a lot of progress, but if you want to quickly lookup a new movie trailer, YouTube is the place to be.

Words With Friends did not change the world but it is a fine representative of the explosion of social gaming that spread in the early 2010s. A clever twist on Scrabble that allowed users to connect with friends or strangers and take their turn whenever it was convenient. The app store is flooded with basic games that are family-friendly and everyone understands. Words With Friends walked so that they could run. Today, these bite-sized brain-teasing puzzlers are practically keeping the whole New York Times app alive. Whether that’s enough to take down the YouTube juggernaut is up to you.

So, reader, what’ll it be? Should YouTube take the crown or do the memories of rounds of Words With Friends with your mom trigger enough nostalgia to send it to the next round?