Reader's Choice: Best apps and games of 2018 according to you

We did some things differently in 2018. We usually just post our picks for the best new apps and best new games of 2018. However, we wanted the opinion of our readers as well. Over the course of December, we did polls for your favorite Android apps and Android games of 2018. Additionally, we used a link shortening service in 2018 that keeps track of the number of clicks any link receives. So here is a big list of apps and games that all of your really liked in 2018. Some of them are new and some of them aren’t, but that’s just how these things roll sometimes. Here are our Reader’s Choice best apps and games from 2018!

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Reader’s Choice Android apps

This part of the list was determined solely on the poll we ran back in early December. You can find the full results here. There were 20 apps in contention and we chose the five with the most votes for this list. Honestly, your favorite here wasn’t even close and we had a ton of apps tie in the lower rankings. If the percentages look a little low, please keep in mind that there were 20 apps on this poll!

• Winner: Bouncer by Sam Reston (22.4% of votes)
• Runner-up: YouTube Music by YouTube (9.4% of votes)
• Third place: Firefox Reality Browser by Mozilla (6% of votes)
• Fourth place: A tie between POCO Launcher by Xiaomi and Smart Launcher 5 by Smart Launcher (5.3% of votes)
• Fifth place: Cake Web Browser by Cake Technologies (5.1% of votes)

Hit the links to check out each app in the Google Play Store. Next year, we’ll probably narrow that down to ten in order to give you a more competitive poll!

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Reader’s Choice Android games

This list was also determined solely by the best Android games poll we ran a couple of weeks ago. To be frank, we couldn’t imagine a world where PUBG Mobile and Fortnite didn’t wreck the competition and that definitely happened. However, we did not expect several games to get literally zero votes and that actually did happen. Hit the link to check out the full results.  There were 20 games on the list.

• Winner: PUBG Mobile by Tencent Games (38% of votes)
• Runner-up: Alto’s Odyssey by Noodlecake Studios (12% of votes)
• Third place: Fortnite by Epic Games (10% of votes)
• Fourth place: Asphalt 9: Legends by Gameloft (7% of votes)
• Fifth place: Bloons TD 6 by Ninja Kiwi (4% of votes)

Hit the links to check out each game in the Google Play Store. Like the app section, putting 20 games on a poll was a little ambitious on our part and that resulted in a lot of low percentages. We’ll definitely work on fixing that next year.

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The apps you clicked on the most

We mentioned in the opening paragraph that we used a link shortening service in 2018. That service tracks human clicks when we make them. Don’t worry, we don’t know your IP address or anything like that, simply that you clicked on the link. The list below are the links that all of you clicked on the most in 2018 for better or for worse.

• Winner: PUBG Mobile Lite (~35,000 clicks)
• Runner-up: Hello Neighbor (~32,000 clicks)
• Third place: Emubox (~30,000 clicks)
• Asphalt 9: Legends (~23,500 clicks)
• 1Weather (~22,000 clicks)
• Google Wallpapers (~20,000 clicks)
• POCO Launcher (~18,500 clicks)
• BlackPlayer Music Player (~17,500 clicks)
• RetroArch (Exactly 14,947 clicks)
• Hyperion Launcher (Exactly 14,946 clicks)

This part of the list is pruned a little bit. Samsung+, for instance, had almost 20,000 clicks. However, people only clicked on that to try out Samsung’s One UI beta. Thus, some apps got tons of clicks for reasons other than people actually wanting the app and we removed those instances. Additionally, these are apps that appeared in app lists, news articles, reviews, how-tos, and other round-ups and content. Some of them aren’t necessarily new apps or games from 2018.

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Of course, a lot of people didn’t get to vote this year. If we missed one of your favorites, tell us about them in the comments below!