The Greatest App of All Time Day 10: Skype vs. Duolingo

It’s Day 10 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time! SwiftKey pulled off a surprise upset yesterday, eliminating Telegram and advancing to the next round. Today, we have two apps that don’t get a lot of attention but have changed the game in their own ways.

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 contestants.

Video Chat – From Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact

At 20 years old, Skype is one of the most seasoned veterans in our bracket. The app started at a time when long-distance phone calls were breathing their last breath and its developers figured out a way to peer-to-peer protocols to make inexpensive voice calls online. By the 2010s, it became the go-to service for video calls and evolved into a sprawling network used for everything from business meetings to check-ins with grandma to expletive-laden gamer chats.

As the 2020s approached, Skype began to face some stiff competition from upstarts like Zoom as well as behemoths like Apple. And as its dominance wained, so did the novelty of video calls. The tech had been spent decades as a scifi trope that we thought we all wanted, then the pandemic plunged us into Zoom hell and tarnished the whole experience. But as we’ve recovered from the worst parts of that period, we’ve seen an explosion of enthusiasm for working at home and Skype played a big role in making that possible.

Taking on Skyle is Duolingo, which 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.

So, reader, what’ll it be? Should Skype make it to the top 16 or does your distaste for conference calls automatically push Duolingo to the next round?