The Greatest App of All Time Day 27: Duolingo vs. Flashlight

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 contestants 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 challengers.

Duolingo is sort of our bracket’s representative for the whole ecosphere of educational apps. We don’t know whether the various efforts to gamify learning in the mobile era have been all that effective, but it couldn’t hurt, right? Most research seems to agree that using an interactive app like Duolingo is a great way to get started with a new language but you’ll need to immerse yourself in the real world if you really want to gain fluency. It seems safe to say that Duolingo has seamlessly helped millions of people quickly learn to ask where the nearest bathroom is in a new language right before a trip abroad. Combined with the rising use of real-time translation audio apps, gamified language apps are helping us get closer to a world where we can all communicate at the most basic level.

For many, the flashlight app is no app at all. It’s a built-in utility on most smartphones these days. But that wasn’t always the case. In 2010, a full two years after the App Store launched, Apple finally allowed apps to use the camera flash on the iPhone 4 as a continuous flashlight. Many, many developers jumped in on the immediate gold rush.

By 2013, there were more than a thousand flashlight apps in the App Store, and then the good times came crashing down when Apple added its native flashlight function. Whoever was still making money in the crowded field was out of business and more than a few physical flashlight manufacturers probably felt the pain as well.

The flashlight app does one thing, and the thing it does is useful. That’s something that countless apps cannot claim.