14 Top Apps Made With Python
For years programmers have struggled to find a high-level programming language with a balance of end-to-end functionality, scalability, and effective runtime.
Even businesses looking for similar features in a programming language had a hard time hitting the jackpot of versatility, efficiency, and functionality until the coming of python in 1991.
Guido Van Rossum’s high-level programming language has evolved and adapted to newer tech, becoming one of the most popular programming languages globally.
Why do developers and programmers love python, and why do top brands like Instagram and Amazon rely on apps made with python?
It is undoubtedly all down to Python being open-source, its simplicity of syntax, the relative ease of learning it, being object-oriented, and its scalability.
This article outlines some Python application examples and the different popular applications built with Python.
14 Types of Applications Built With Python
Being a high-level and all-purpose programming language means Python is a widely popular choice for data science and machine learning, web app development, and general software development. Below are 14 practical cases of apps that rely on Python application development:
#1. Dropbox
Dropbox, the popular file-hosting desktop service, is one of the most lovable Python apps ever built.
It’s incredible how the company behind this fantastic tool took something simple as storing things online and scaling it to an impressive level, making a useful product and lots of money.
Recently Dropbox moved from Python 2.7 to Python 3, with the move considered one of the largest Python 3 migrations ever recorded.
Users get to install Dropbox on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices, and this is all down to Python’s portability.
#2. Amazon
Among our list of apps made with Python are Amazon, the e-commerce, entertainment, and cloud computing heavyweights.
Amazon uses the Python programming language to build the recommendation engine. It also writes the machine learning system that works on a Hadoop database in Python.
Since Python is the top technology when it comes to providing large data analysis due to its scalability, it is no surprise that Amazon relies on it.
#3. Pinterest
Pinterest is a popular social network that enables users to collect, bookmark, and share images with other users.
It is a common Python applications example and is among the most used apps on the internet today. Pinterest uses Python to deal with large amounts of content.
While Pinterest likes to experiment with other technologies, a huge part of its source code is written in Python.
Their developers built their social media platform for sharing and collecting visual content with Python in 2009/2010 because it was the tech they knew.
But it has become more clear that Python’s flexibility drew Pinterest’s developers to the high-level multi-purpose programming language.
#4. Instagram
Instagram is the social media application that changed the digital photography space forever, making it more widespread, accessible, instant, and defined by newer marketing rules.
As one of the apps made with Python, Instagram has amplified lines of creativity with its tech stack evolving a lot since its inception.
Way before they were acquired for a massive sum by Facebook, Instagram was a fairly basic website built on Django, one of Python’s high-level web frameworks.
Creators said it was exceedingly scalable, freakishly fast, and absolutely secure. Even today, the multibillion-dollar social network still relies on Python application development.
#5. Quora
Quora is one of the largest question and answer websites that professionals in multiple fields rely on, and it is another Python application example.
The team behind the Quora website did not want to use PHP in the late 2000s, perhaps taking a leaf from Facebook’s experience of using a lot of money and resources to get rid of its legacy software.
Python was the obvious choice, although they did consider Scala, Java, and C# for a while. They chose Python for the speed of development it offered.
They wanted a high-programming language capable of launching their MVP as quickly as possible, and Python was the best at that.
#6. Uber
Uber’s founders had a choice to make: Python or Ruby? If you were going to create a platform that performs many calculations, then the natural choice was going to be Python.
Besides, Python was much easier to learn, and the developers found Ruby a lot more difficult to master given the circumstances.
The global peer-to-peer ride-sharing company and its Python apps’ backend predict the supply and demand, arrival times of drivers, and traffic.
Such a catalog of predictions needs a solution for mathematical calculations hence why Uber relied on Python application development. Uber uses the Tornado Python web framework to handle asynchronous programming.
It has developed its own visualization frameworks that Python can access to make visualizations that are high-data density which is renderable in a browser.
The company is serious about its technology stake and is usually open about this part of its operations.
#7. Spotify
Music streaming giant Spotify is not only the world’s biggest streaming service; it is absolutely a modern mainstay.
Spotify leans toward Python application development because of its advanced data analytics and its speed.
The programming language’s features allow Spotify to manage some functions like Radio and Discover based on users’ personal musical preferences.
Spotify also uses Python for its backend and so much more, and users can testify that the platform is solid.
#8. Reddit
American discussion website and social news aggregator Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet and has warmed its way into the hearts of internet users.
Reddit has become a source of all things delightful, from cat videos and dank memes to educational tips and instructional content.
The platform has grown to become a tight-knit community. Reddit also relies on Python for what the programming language does best – ready-to-use libraries and its simplicity.
Although originally, Reddit was written in Common Lisp, its search for wider access to code libraries and better development flexibility led it to switch to Python application development.
Now users can post video, image, or text content in thousands of categories. They can also vote it down and up.
A localization management platform helps users translate Reddit into 89 different languages, while Python handles all the complex functionality and workload with its batteries-included approach.
#9. Facebook (Meta)
Facebook gets a bad rap for all its prying tendencies, but the social media giant is unarguably one of the biggest and most important brands in history.
Although nowadays the company behind the app goes by Meta, one thing is for sure; the company has a massive tech stack.
Their tech stack includes a lot of technologies and languages but being one of the top Python apps means Python is responsible for 21% of Facebook’s infrastructure’s codebase.
#10. Netflix
Netflix may well be the Spotify of video and movies, considering the global streaming brand’s giant strides.
They went from DVD-by-mail services to a high-tech leader and heavyweight, offering streaming video content to millions of subscribers globally.
Python should be thanked, and for a good reason, too. The programming language contributes to Netflix’s strong recommendation and analytics engine strengths.
With these functions, Netflix comfortably provides subscribers with suggestions while predicting the sort of original content they should be ordering.
#11. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is another top app that relies on Python, though it was initially written with C#. It processes almost a million survey responses daily.
It switched to Python for the programming language’s wide range of libraries and simplicity that combined to make web app building fast and straightforward.
What’s more, working with set unit testing, deployment, and more, became easier for the developers at SurveyMonkey when they switched to Python.
#12. Instacart
Instacart is a successful same-day pickup and grocery delivery service serving over 25,000 grocery stores in more than 5,500 cities across the United States and Canada.
It’s got a valuation of $8 billion, but most importantly, Instacart uses Python libraries like NumPy and Pandas.
It also relies on Python to handle demand forecasting and estimate, reads relevant data, formulates the number of shoppers they’ll need for the coming weeks, and then writes the values and estimates.
#13. Bitly
A hugely popular URL shortening company based in New York City is another platform that uses Python and its features to shorten more than 600 million links per month.
Peeple shorten links for different purposes, from email mailing lists to social networking and more, and Bitly helps them do so.
Since its establishment in 2008, Bitly has grown to become a URL shortening giant and is one of the biggest in the industry, and this is all down to Python web development. Nowadays, it leverages Python for link management.
#14. Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla is one of the most recognizable browsers in the world. It’s hard to find computer users who haven’t used it, but many probably don’t know that Python is a big part of Mozilla Firefox’s success.
Like some of the biggest apps, Python became the ideal programming language for Mozilla Firefox after developers originally built it on PHP+CakePHP.
As the company grew and developed, its initial language couldn’t cater to millions of searches per month, promoting developers to move Mozilla to Python+Django.
Today, Mozilla is a widely used PC browser, and Mozilla-central has more than 35,000 Python files and over 230,000 lines of code.
The company utilizes Python for implementing tasks like building command-line tooling, CI configuration, building the system, and test harness. Django now serves Mozilla’s support site and adds on for the browser.
Examples of Python Application
The examples of Python applications cut across different fields and functions with the high-level language capable of generating meaningful impacts and insight.
Python has diverse applications, whether you’re extracting important insights with machine learning or manipulating data visualizations with data science.
Python is capable of revolutionizing the extraction of meaning from information and developing new applications. Below we give 6 examples of Python applications in different fields.
#1. Web Applications
Users leverage Python web frameworks like Django and Flask to manipulate Python in the backend to build some effective server-side web applications.
While web frameworks aren’t needed to construct sustainable structures for web applications, you will find that it is unusual that existing open-source libraries aren’t implemented together with server-side Python development and speeding up the app deployment process.
Remember that you can’t directly compile or interpret Python in the web browser. Meanwhile, projects like pyjs can comfortably compile Python to JavaScript.
You’ll also find that Python developers usually interlace Python and JavaScript to make client-side and server applications.
This means that Python is executed on the server-side, and JavaScript is downloaded easily to the client-side of the web browser and executed appropriately.
#2. Data Science
Data science is arguably one of the most sought-after skills in the tech world, and it cuts across different spheres.
With Python and its multiple libraries like NumPy, Pandas, TensorFlow, and more, data scientists can comfortably extract useful and priceless information from the data they work with.
Meanwhile, libraries such as Seaborn and Matplotib go a step further in allowing amateur and expert data science professionals and Python programmers to concentrate on data visualization via charts and graphs.
If you have hopes and plans of becoming anything in the data science space, Python programming language is one of the first things you need to know.
Developers at a much higher level can synthesize data science manipulations with machine learning models to predict, extract, and visualize features of unstructured data like time series stock market data or imaging data.
Besides, open-source repositories on Github are full of business-level Python applications like toxic comment classification and NLP-driven sentiment. In fact, Python applications examples in data science have endless possibilities.
#3. Web Development
Web development is one of the various examples of Python applications, and it is widely considered the go-to programming language for web developers.
The role Python plays in web development cannot be overemphasized, and its several web development frameworks like Flask, Django, and Pyramid really drive home this point.
Web development frameworks like the ones we’ve mentioned come stacked with standard libraries that lead to a reduced development time and permit easy protocol integration.
#4. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
One of the most vital uses of the Python programming language is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Python is a stable language capable of handling computations needed to build machine learning models.
Libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, Keras, etc., are perfect for machine learning applications. Besides, Python is also applied in several AI solutions such as data processing, image recognition, advanced computing, etc.
Nowadays, in almost every research-oriented department, many machine learning models and architectures are becoming important in solving massive data problems.
There’s no doubt that machine learning is on course to revolutionize every industry sector, despite the algorithms or models applied in whatever fields, and we have Python to thank.
Machine learning frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow, and Keras come in handy when developing and deploying predictive models.
Below are some examples of research level and business machine learning Python applications:
- Transferring images and also generating image styles.
- The use of NLP in classifying insincere and toxic questions on a popular platform, Quora.
- Using computer vision to retrieve Google landmarks images.
#5. Game Development
Python plays a crucial role in backend game development with mods and logic, and the language has always contributed massively to the video game industry.
To put this into perspective a bit, below are some of the best Python frameworks used in game development today:
- Panda3D
- Pygame
- Cocos2D
- Pyglet
- PyKyra
- PyOpenGL
- Kivy
The use of open-source game development libraries like Pygame allows programmers to build some simple but interesting games like Guessing Game and the Dungeon Game.
Python programming language has also been responsible for developing some of the most popular and cherished games of the early 2000s, one of which is the engaging Battlefield 2.
In addition to Battlefield 2, these are some top Python applications examples in game development you may not know about:
- Frets on Fire
- Civilization IV
- World of Tanks
- Sims 4
- EVE Online
- Toontown Online
#6. Business Applications
Having an open-source and scalable high-level language is incredibly important in business applications today. This is because modern business applications cover ERP, e-commerce, and more.
As a programming language, Python helps businesses develop fully functional and scalable Python apps easily.
Business analysts use some platforms like Tryton to develop and deploy a range of Python applications.
Business development tools include data science solutions, web development, natural language processing, machine learning frameworks, blockchain-enabled contracts, video game development, Fintech platforms, and entertainment.
Are you thinking about starting a project in Python?
At Innuy we have an experienced team of experts ready to help you.
Conclusion
Python heralded the emergence of a modern programming language with applications in machine learning, data science, python application development, and more.
The open-source, high-level programming language has become the top choice for some of the biggest brands globally, so many companies rely on Python application development.
So whether you’re building useful web applications with Python frameworks or just using machine learning to optimize your business outcomes, Python will, without a doubt, produce outstanding benefits at higher and lower levels.