Here are the top 10 fastest-growing apps of the year so far (SQ)

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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.

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 enterprise users. Beyond just Discord, the popular Apple iPhone and Mac to-do list tool Things 3 also won a place on the chart, indicating that it's not just enterprises looking for a service like that of Zapier. 

Here are the top 10 fastest-growing apps of 2018, according to Zapier:

Ghost is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for bloggers and publishers with an emphasis on design. 

ClickUp is a project management tool that combines to-do lists with spreadsheets and other kinds of documents, to help you organize any kind of task. 

Landbot lets users make their own simple chatbots without any coding. Zapier CEO Wade Foster says that he sees Landbot as an emerging player in helping companies find new ways for their customers to navigate their websites. 

Coda is a program that combines documents and spreadsheets for a new way to organize information. 

SalesFlare is a automated customer relationship management (CRM) tool aimed at small businesses and startups. 

See Also:

• The founders of Google Voice just raised $50 million to scale a business-call platform they think could put an end to phonelines once and for all
• 9 trends that are keeping IT spending at record highs, according to top IT execs — and it's good news for Amazon and Microsoft
• The PC industry just showed its first signs of growth in 6 years — but don't expect this rebound to last

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