It’s not new to anyone that “metaverse” is the word of fashion. Now, the app stores for Android and iOS begin to be flooded with apps that contain this term in their name, as a bait to attract new users amid euphoria over a technology still undeveloped.
In a recent survey, Sensor Tower identified 552 apps that include “metaverse” in their titles or descriptions. In addition, the vast majority of this group of apps have been launched in recent months alone.
Everyone thinks it’s part of the metaverse
We have already explained, in general terms, what is the metaverse and what it can mean for the evolution of the internet to such “Web 3.0”. However, it is still a very broad and untangible concept. Currently, it can be said that any immersive online platform that allows interaction between users is a metaverse.
Therefore, the popularity of the word is being (greatly) harnessed by marketing teams. The boom of these apps followed Facebook’s October announcement, changing its name to Meta due to the company’s new focus on technologies for the metaverse.
As much as Zuckerberg’s Matrix hasn’t come out of the paper yet, more and more startups have begun to describe themselves as companies dedicated to the metaverse. For example, the popular game Roblox was touted as a pioneer in this movement.
Other examples are the various MMORPGs and play-to-earn games with integration to NFTs and cryptocurrencies. The famous Axie Infinity, for example, is introducing a virtual land system and other mechanisms, but already calls all this metaverse, as well as the other virtual batch projects of the growing digital real estate sector.
There is not yet a technical definition for metaverse
The emergence of hundreds of apps that take advantage of this uproar over technology is partly due to the absence of a technical definition of metaverse. In fact, even conceptually speaking, this term still opens the way for interpretations. At the moment, it seems that marketers don’t care much about any of this and put the word everywhere.
After Facebook’s rebranding for Meta on October 28 last year, the number of apps that started bringing the word “metaverse” grew 66% in just one month. By the end of November, 29 apps were updated to include the term, more than double the 11 apps identified in October.
The Sensor Tower report also brought more interesting data. The company looked at what types of applications were exploiting this trend. Experts pointed out that many of the apps also referred to other technological terms on the rise and generally linked to such “metaverse”, such as “crypto”, “NFTs”, “AR” or “VR”, for example.
Among all, “crypto” is the most present term connected to metaverse applications, with a 23% presence among the total number of apps analyzed. “NFTs” was the second most popular term, appearing in 18% of the studied group. The terms “AR” and “VR” were found in 11% and 9% of the analyzed base, respectively.