National Download Day Date in the current year: December 28, 2024

Mobile applications, commonly referred to simply as apps, are software applications designed to run on mobile devices such as phones, tablets, or smart watches. During the early era of mobile phones, apps were intended for general productivity assistance such as contacts, calendar, email, weather information, etc. However, public demand for apps caused rapid development of many different kinds of mobile apps. The first major smartphone app store, Apple’s App Store, was launched in July 2008. Google’s Android Market, late renamed Google Play, followed several months later.

Mobile apps haven’t been around for that long in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of people these days cannot imagine their lives without them. We use apps to look up weather and traffic, plan routes, make various bookings, order goods, learn languages, communicate with each other, play, pay for things, organize work, and for million other purposes. Most of these things can be done without an app, but apps make our lives much easier and save us tons of time so they surely deserve to be celebrated.

The exact origins of National Download Day are unclear, but it is known why it is celebrated on December 28. In 2018, Fort Mason Games, a mobile game company, conducted a survey that showed that December 28 is the day when the most apps are downloaded in the entire year in the United States. And there’s a good reason for that: smartphones and tablets have become popular holiday gifts, and once the festivities are over, Americans finally get to downloading and installing apps on their new devices.

Of course, the best way to celebrate National Download Day is to download some new apps for your smartphone or tablet, even if you haven’t got a new device for Christmas. If you’ve found several apps that serve the same purpose, download them all and then choose which one you like the most. We also have some more ideas on how you can observe National Download Day:

• Get rid of the apps you never use to make room for new ones.
• Make sure all apps on your phone and/or tablet are up-to-date.
• Organize the apps on the home screen of your phone or tablet.
• Give a shout out to your favorite apps and their developers on social media.
• Rate and review your favorite apps in the App Store or Google Play.
• If you’ve been thinking about learning a new skill, download and install an app for that.
• Help someone who is not very tech savvy to install new apps.
• Try your hand at coding an app.

And don’t forget to spread the word about the holiday on social media with the hashtag #NationalDownloadDay using your X (Twitter), Facebook, Tumblr, Bluesky, TikTok, Snapchat, and other social media apps.

By the way, National Download Day is not the only holiday celebrating apps. There’s also National App Day, observed annually on December 11. It was launched by the mobile solutions platform Platinum Edge Media in 2017 to recognize the ingenious people who develop apps and highlight the role that apps play in our everyday lives.