Providing for prioritization of applications operating on a client device with respect to access to online content or services is described herein. By way of example, the prioritizing can be correlated with allocation of network resources for respective applications. An application having higher priority can be allocated a larger amount of resources, a guaranteed amount of resources, a guaranteed quality of service, first access to resources, or the like. Likewise, an application with lower priority can be allocated a lower amount of resources, have best effort resources, access to residual resources, and so forth. In various embodiments, applications can be prioritized based on a status of the application with respect to the client device. As one illustrative example, applications actively receiving content, responding to user commands, or maximized or displayed on a graphic display can be afforded higher priority, whereas inactive or minimized applications can be afforded a lower priority.