Tis the season for end-of-year reviews. Today I'll introduce some of the showcased top apps in South Korea for 2021 according to Google Play.
Before I start, be aware that these are the "올해를 빛낸 앱" or "this year's shinning apps." I.e. these are apps that were specially outstanding and noteworthy for this year, 2021. That means the list does not directly include apps based on overall popularity. So no ultra-common apps like Naver, KakaoTalk, etc. that are obviously popular across multiple years. All the apps on this list were standouts for 2021. There was also an element of user voting in determining these outcomes.
 |
| Google Play's Most Outstanding Apps for South Korea for 2021 |
Top Overall App in South Korea for 2021:
Millie’s Library
 |
| Millie's Library on Google Play |
 |
| Millie's Library, as featured for 2021 winner by Google Play. Image: Google Play |
Millie's Library (밀리의 서재) is probably the most popular reading and audiobook app in Korea. It offers many new releases, classic favorites, book communities with mini-competitions, celebrity guests showcasing their favorite books and doing readings, customized recommendations based on your reading history and interests, etc.
This was another app that benefited greatly from the pandemic, with people in lockdowns looking for ways to both entertain and educate themselves. They provided some of their large library of content for free due to the ongoing COVID and apparently were acquired by KT's Genie AI speaker branch so their audiobook content can be played on domestic Giga Genie AI speakers.
Top Entertainment App in South Korea for 2021:
StoryPlay
 |
| StoryPlay interactive web-novel app on Google Play |
StoryPlay is an interactive "choose your own adventure" type game, featuring stories and content direct from popular Naver Webtoons among other sources. It acts as an interactive novel where at key points in the story you can tap the bubble to decide which choice the character should make.
 |
| Some webtoon content available as interactive StoryPlay games. Image: StoryPlay |
Top Hidden Gem in South Korea for 2021:
Descartes
 |
| Descartes wholistic improvement app on Google Play |
Descartes is a kind of wholistic self-improvement / training app. It features various brain teaser puzzles, but also has elements of personal at-home physical fitness and wellness, along with spiritual motivations and reflective exercises. The app helps you incorporate a little bit of sudoku, some English language learning, yoga practice, spiritually-inspired reflections, etc into your busy daily life (or your stagnating stuck-at-home lockdown life). Supposedly good for those over age 30 with an "aging" brain. I better jump on this bandwagon then.
Top Daily Life App in South Korea for 2021:
Clova Note
 |
| Clova Note app on Google Play |
I've talked about Clova Note a few times on Twitter. This app is made by Naver and does an amazing job at recording and transcribing speech. It recognizes and distinguishes English, Korean, and Japanese. It records lengthy meetings or even integrated Zoom meetings, automatically transcribing all the dictated speech into a highly searchable, auto-tagged list. It even distinguishes and tags each individual speaker to know who said what and when. Both the app and web interface compliment each other well. I've played around with it a few times and was generally impressed.
Top Self-Improvement App in South Korea for 2021:
HowFIT
 |
| HowFit home training and exercise app on Google Play |
With most gyms locked down for most of the year, at-home physical fitness exploded in popularity this year. HowFit capitalized on this interest with some kind of wild AI stick-figure tech that determines how well precisely you are doing the exercises. This kind of personal touch, matching you with exercises/routines for your level, and the excitement of competing with other users, made it a popular Korean alternative to Apple Fitness+ or Peloton or whatever.
Top Social Contribution App in South Korea for 2021 :
BigWalk
Big Walk is a competitive pedometer app that tracks your steps and donates to charities. The more you walk, the more you donate. You collect "steps" and then donate those steps to the charity of your choice from a list of participating groups.
Top App of 2021 for Wearables in South Korea:
T-Money
 |
| T-money app on Google Play |
T-money is more than just a public transportation payment card. It is also accepted at most convenience stores and many other locations around Korea. Tmoney released an app for the Samsung Galaxy Smartwatch that was showcased this year. I guess this is a good alternative to the convenience of Apple Watch payments that Americans use.
Top Foldable App in South Korea for 2021:
Watcha
 |
| Watcha streaming service on Google Play |
Netflix wasn't the only popular streaming video service this year. Korea's own domestic OTT service "Watcha" has been growing in popularity. I don't use it myself, but taking a look at some blog posts it seems like there's a decent amount of foreign content there along with of course large swaths of Korean content:
 |
| Some English language foreign content on Watcha Image: Cwon's Life blog |
 |
| More content available on Watcha. Image: 인생의 아름다운 순간들 blog |
This was thrown in on the "foldables" category but I'm not sure why. I haven't seen anything specific about how this app performs on a foldable phone but perhaps it does do the split screen format well. I have to say, after seeing a friend show up with his new Galaxy Z Flip, I was less than excited. It looks like a tricorder from the old Star Trek series. Maybe that was the aesthetic they wanted. It looked and handled goofy and surprisingly bulky. Not the future if you ask me. The Z Fold, however, seems much more promising. I actually found myself enjoying to use it. The future will flip that way.
The rest of the Top Outstanding Apps in South Korea for 2021
Here's the leaderboard image Google produced showing the other 2 top apps in these categories. A bit small so click it to see it full sized:
 |
| Top Android Apps 2021. Image: Google |
You can read more about these on Google's Korean-language blog post where they highlighted the full list here:
Google 한국 블로그: 구글플레이가 ‘2021 올해를 빛낸 앱·게임’을 발표했습니다!
There's also a page on Google Play that highlights the apps along with direct links to their pages on Google Play if you want more info about any app specifically:
See those here: 올해를 빛낸 앱 - Android 앱 Google Play
Actual Top Apps of Korea for 2021
All the featured apps above are standouts in their categories for the year, but they don't actually give a great representation of which apps actually were the most popular. For that, you have to dig around a little bit more to the overall popularity section, where you will find a more appropriate and telling selection, such as these:
 |
| Overall most popular apps for 2021. Image: Google Play |
No surprise here, the actually most popular apps this year (the apps that saw the most overall growth in 2021) are mostly pandemic related.
Overall actually most popular apps in Korea for 2021
- COOV
The Korean government vaccination certification app - Coupang Play
A video streaming service that is included with a Coupang premium "Wow" membership. I wrote about this here: Taking a look at Coupang Play (screenshot tour) - The건강보험
The Korean government national health insurance app, for tracking your health records, etc - Disney+
Released in Korea this year - Coupang Eats
The food delivery app from Coupang - Musinsa
Some kind of online fashion mall shopping app - what3words
A navigation and location mapping app. See below for more. - 경찰청 폴-안티스파이 3.0 - Pol-Antispy
A Korean national police app apparently for monitoring your device to prevent malware, spyware, spam/phishing calls/texts, etc. Looks to be depreciated and replaced as of Dec 2021. - 퀸잇 - QueenIt
Some kind of fashion shopping app for department store brands
 |
| KakaoMap using what3words tech. Image: IT Donga |
The location in the sample is a square meter spot that can be represented with the 3 random Korean words 주로.면바지.완전. Search those words on KakaoMap with 3 slashes in front, like this:
///주로.면바지.완전
Finally, if you're interested, YouTube produced a series of cute short videos where two popular Korean actors (one from Squid Game) presents these app awards.
Which I wrote a bit about here:
Google-produced "Best of 2021" app awards videos, plus YouTube's top Korean videos for 2021
Comments