Editor's note: revised June 19, 2026. Originally published August 27, 2012. 50-app 2012 mobile PR tooling list preserved in compressed form; retrospective frame added.
The Everything-PR 2012 Top 50 iPhone Apps for PR Pros captured the mobile productivity stack at a specific moment: smartphones were becoming the primary work device for communications professionals, social media was fragmenting fast, and the App Store was a brand-new commercial layer. Fourteen years on, the majority of the apps named below have been acquired, discontinued, or restructured. The platforms that have survived are the ones that built durable user habits — Adobe Reader, Dropbox, Evernote, Skype, Gmail, the core social platforms — and the ones that consolidated through acquisition. The list is preserved as a record of how mobile PR tooling looked at category formation.
The 2012 categories
The original list organized 50 apps across five categories: document management, news, social networking, social media monitoring, and communicating-and-productivity. Each category got ten apps. The cross-section is a reasonable proxy for what the working PR professional's iPhone home screen looked like in mid-2012.
What survived
The 2026 mobile PR stack is dominated by a much smaller, much better-capitalized set of platforms. Below: the survivors from the 2012 list.
Document management. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office (which absorbed and replaced Office² Plus, Quickoffice, and Documents To Go) remain core. Genius Scan and TurboScan both survive as still-active scanning apps. SignEasy remains in business. PrintDirect, Docstoc, and Office² Plus are gone.
News. CNN, NYTimes, BBC News, Fortune, and PR Newswire apps remain. Fast Company and strategy+business have rebranded their app strategies. Content Marketing Mag, Brand Finance App, and Inspiring Innovation Mag have been discontinued.
Social networking. Facebook, Twitter (now X), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and WordPress remain operating mobile apps, though several have undergone substantial repositioning. Google+ was discontinued in 2019. Sendible remains operating as a social media management platform. LiveProfile shut down.
Social media monitoring. This category has been the most thoroughly consolidated. HootSuite acquired Talkwalker in 2023 and remains a major platform. Radian6's mobile app was killed when Salesforce discontinued Social Studio in 2024. TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter, now operates as part of X Pro. Klout shut down in 2018. Engage121, Cotweet/SocialEngage, Seesmic, Abuzz, Wired PR Works, and Trackur (mobile) have variously discontinued or absorbed.
Communicating and productivity. Gmail, Evernote, Skype, Remember The Milk, and iTranslate remain operating. GoToMeeting remains as a video conferencing platform. Bump (which Google acquired in 2013) was discontinued in 2014. ooVoo was discontinued in 2017. Viber remains operating, owned by Rakuten. Speak it! remains as an iOS text-to-speech app.
What the 2012 list never anticipated
Three categories that did not exist on the 2012 list now anchor the working PR professional's mobile stack:
AI engine apps. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are now installed on the working PR professional's phone — not as monitoring tools but as primary drafting, research, and analysis tools. The shift from social media monitoring as the dominant mobile category to AI engine usage as the dominant mobile category is the structural shift of the 2022–2026 period.
Video conferencing. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Webex have absorbed the working meeting layer that GoToMeeting represented in 2012. Slack, Teams, and Discord have absorbed substantial portions of the messaging layer.
The creator-tool stack. CapCut, Canva, InShot, Notion, and the broader creator tooling ecosystem now occupies space the 2012 list did not anticipate. PR professionals working with creators, influencers, and short-form video editorial are increasingly fluent in tools that were not on any 2012 list.
The takeaway
The 2012 Top 50 iPhone Apps list remains a useful record of how the working PR professional's mobile device was tooled at the moment smartphones were becoming the primary work platform. The consolidation that followed — most of the social media monitoring apps absorbed or discontinued, the core social platforms compressing into a handful of dominant products, AI engines emerging as a new category — reshaped the stack into something the 2012 list could not have predicted. For current coverage of the mobile and AI tooling stack see the EPR AI Visibility archive.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
