NinetyEight | Gen Z Insights Report
Beyond The Feed The Apps Gen Z Uses When They're Not on Social Media
Powered by the Koi Pond
Creatures Gen Z : of Habit We already know Gen Z can't live without TikTok and Instagram, that part's obvious. What we wanted to know was everything else. What apps are we using beyond social media? Spoiler alert: it’s not what you think. We asked our Koi Ponders* what non-social media apps they rely on every day, expecting to see trendy, niche favorites like Beli or Strava. Instead, the apps with the highest usage were literally just the ones that come predownloaded on our phones. In almost every part of life, Gen Z wants things to be easy. Convenient. Familiar. If there's an option that requires the least amount of effort possible, we'll probably (definitely, 100%, no questions asked) take it.
*The Koi Pond is NinetyEight’s proprietary research community with over 2000+ Gen Z participants. Learn more about The Koi Pond here.
Screentime Breakdown Can you really blame us though? We've spent the majority of our lives finding ways to shave seconds off everyday tasks to lighten our mental load.
Q: Which default app(s) do you use most often?
91%
73%
71%
65%
59%
59%
We wake up to our pre-set auto repeating alarm, check the weather app to pick an outfit, dump our grocery list on the notes app, set up calendar reminders to remember loved one’s birthdays, and pull up the calculator to split the tip at dinner. Our entire day runs on default apps we never even had to think about downloading.
Built-in Behavior The apps running Gen Z's daily routine aren't the culturally buzzy ones, they're the invisible defaults. We're the first generation to grow up fully wired into technology from the start. These are the routines we built before we even knew we were building them. We didn't choose convenience as a lifestyle, we were raised into it, and that's why it's so hard to shake.
“I feel like the [default apps are] good standard apps that help me with general productivity.”
Areeba, 2003 “I enjoy the simplicity of Apple apps. They are intuitive and I am very familiar with them, having only used iPhones my whole life.”
Taylor, 2003 Throughout our lives, there’s been a plethora of apps to choose from. But having access to a billion apps has given us major choice fatigue. We’d rather just stick to the preinstalled apps we’re already familiar with.
Outlasting the Hype It's not that trendy apps never stood a chance. Photo apps like VSCO and BeReal had their moments in pop culture, but at their core, they were competing with social media apps we were already comfortable with, so naturally with time they died out.
Sometimes we just want to capture a moment, not manage another feed. We stick to the built-in camera app because we live by the mindset, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” No matter how many times something new tries to pull us away, we always find our way back to the apps that have the basic functionalities we need, without trying to sell us on anything. After hours of doomscrolling on Instagram and TikTok, we just want something simple.
Convenience in Culture For apps we barely think about, default apps have had a significant cultural impact. Our Notes app started as a place to jot down reminders but it quickly turned into something deeper. It’s the place that holds our passwords, our list of future baby names, and the most devastating paragraphs we’ve ever written. It’s messy and unfiltered. That’s exactly why it started having a moment in internet culture.
As Gen Zs,we don't keep our inside jokes inside. If we have an opinion, we’re posting it to see if everyone else feels the same. We'll post a TikTok of us scrolling through our notes, reading our current wishlist out loud, revealing the embarrassing drafted texts we (thankfully) never built up the courage to send.
Shared Screens, Shared Secrets The Notes app became such a core shared experience that it’s developed its own dedicated trends, i.e: “just a girl and her notes app”. Next thing you know, everyone's sharing their own notes, and suddenly we're all connected over something that started as literally nothing more than our unfiltered thoughts and random lists. Over time, the Notes app screenshots turned into an instantly recognizable meme format. The second you see a screenshot of a note, you should already know what kind of energy to expect.
“The Notes app keeps everything I need right there, I've tried to install aesthetic notes apps before but there's really no point. Sometimes you just need a sloppy word dump”.
Amber, 2002
Speaking our Language But the same structure we turned into a meme,also became the go-to format for depicting “unfiltered” sincerity. Brands caught on to this. When a brand messes up, we can always expect a Notes app screenshot apology because it looks exactly like what we use to spiral about our own feelings. And it's not just apologies. Brands have started using the Notes app format for everything from announcing a new drop, teasing a collab, and even addressing a national health concern, just to seem more in touch. That’s the real power Gen Z has over culture. Our daily habits, especially those rooted in convenience, have shaped the culture around us.
Pringles (Instagram, 2026)
Taco Bell (Instagram, 2026)
But there’s a disconnect between the culture that has been shaped naturally by our daily habits and the culture Gen Z is directly demanding from brands. While our desire for optimization has pushed culture toward greater convenience and ease, our growing desire for being ethical consumers is pulling us in the opposite direction.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words Gen Z isn’t afraid to cancel brands and drag them in the comments, but when it comes to actually holding ourselves accountable to this?
We get quiet. When the cancellation-spree goes wild, everyone hops on the bandwagon and for a second it feels like real change is happening. But cancel culture has a shelf life. Once the noise dies down and it's just us making an individual choice, Gen Z will silently open the apps again. We’ve optimized life so much that we now expect everything to be convenient. We expect our packages to arrive in two days, our coffee orders to be saved, and our playlists to know exactly what mood we’re in. Being an “ethical consumer” is a lot easier said than done. And it's not just pure convenience, it's what we've already built inside these apps. We don’t want to lose our Spotify playlists that we’ve curated over the years, or lose the Starbucks rewards we’ve been stacking up. So we tell ourselves it's easier to stay, and honestly, it usually is.
The Convenience Chokehold Despite our cancellation efforts in recent years, our app-usage survey revealed category leaders remain in power. Q:Which music app(s) do you use most?
73% Q:Which shopping app(s) do you use most?
78% Q:Which food app(s) do you use most?
45% Our problem isn’t whether we can spot the issue, but finding the willingness to do something about it.
Spotify: We'll drag them for artist payouts and political ads in one post, then hit play on our playlist in the next. Losing years of curated playlists hits harder than losing a boycott. Amazon: We know about the warehouse conditions, yet we still add items to our carts, because two-day shipping doesn't have a real competitor yet. Starbucks: Labor disputes trend online for a day, then we're back in the drive-thru because it's literally everywhere and the app has our orders saved. My parents pay for a Spotify family plan. I would not support Spotify, if there were an ethical option that wouldn't cost me a lot every month.
Taylor, 2003
What It Takes to Break a Habit Gen Z falls back on convenience, even when it means compromising on what we claim to care about.
Apple Music 26.9%
We cancel, we criticize, and then we quietly go right back to the same habits. So when we sat down with the data, we expected more of the same.
Then we found an outlier.
Spotify 73.1%
Q: Which music/audio app do you use? When we asked Koi Ponders what music and audio platform they use, one answer won by a landslide: Spotify. This was very surprising considering that Spotify isn't even pre-installed on our phones. Apple Music is. If convenience really drives everything the way the rest of this report suggests, Apple Music should've had the built-in advantage from day one.
Craving for Connection Instead, 73% of Koi Ponders use Spotify, more than three times the usage of Apple Music, despite the two apps offering nearly identical services. We went back to respondents and asked the obvious question: why Spotify? Price and sound quality came up, but it wasn’t the driving answer.
The answer was community.
“Spotify lets me make playlists with my friends.”
KB, 2003 “"I will forever be a Spotify girly because of the selection of music and the way you can make your playlists"
Ruby, 2004 Community may trump comfort here, but our need for convenience isn't going anywhere. It's what makes our day-to-day actually functional. It's how we can order dinner without calling anyone and get where we need to go without a paper map. Convenience is the thing that keeps us sane in a world that moves way too fast. But convenience by itself can't replicate the feeling of being part of something with other people. Gen Z is looking for something bigger to be part of.
The FOMO Is Real We’re joining run clubs, book clubs, online forums to discuss our love for our favorite movies, and showing up to day-time coffee shop parties. Meet ups with total strangers are trending too. We’re meeting at the park to find a Tom Holland lookalike and inviting strangers to our houses to have a coloring night.
“I got it [Spotify] 10 years ago because that’s what everyone else was using and never stopped”
El, 2004 “All of my friends were using it [Spotify] when I was choosing a music app”
Jamie, 1999 We can be so desperate for community that we lose our ability to think for ourselves in the process. We cancel a brand without fact-checking it, buy something we don't need, download an app because everyone else is downloading it. Gen Z is a generation of bandwagoners, and that's not a coincidence. Chasing the group is just another version of chasing community.
The Internet, but make it Social Gen Z is looking for these community experiences, both in-person and online. Every Gen Z will tell you that their favorite part about TikTok is the comment section. And the place they spend the most time online is probably in our niche fandom groups, talking to others who love Bad Bunny as much as we do. This is what makes the internet feel less like a scroll and more like a shared space.
Gen Z is not just convenience-driven, we're community-motivated. Spotify is a space that's social, personal, and curated. Spotify turned music listening into a social experience. We’re posting our Daylists on our stories, queuing up a Jam with our friends, and finding the best niche playlist that somehow describes exactly what we’re feeling.
The More, the Merrier Every year, we wait for Spotify Wrapped to drop just so our feeds can flood with everyone's top songs and artists because it's more fun when everyone's talking about it at the same time. Spotify gave us the power to actually feel connected in a digital world. “Everyone uses spotify so I can use the social features. And they know all my history and preferences already."
Hailey, 2002 If brands can offer that same sense of connection, convenience won't be the only thing keeping us loyal. We'll build new habits around brands that understand what we crave:
community.
Connecting with Gen Z For Gen Z, convenience isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about saving our brainpower for the things that actually matter. While pre-installed default apps play a crucial role in our daily routine, brands can still break our habits by making our lives feel less chaotic and more connected. But to earn Gen Z’s long-term loyalty, brands need to focus on three factors:
Social
Create seamless, low-effort channels to connect with friends and meet new people online.
Valuable
Offer a clear, specific value that earns its place in our routine. If it solves something real, we will keep coming back to it.
Personalized
Develop tools that feel hyper-specific to our individual tastes, making us feel seen rather than targeted.
The algorithm changes everyday. We’ll help you stay one step ahead.
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