Owned by the Chinese fast-growing unicorn ByteDance, TikTok has made it to the list of world’s top 10 apps by downloads.
TikTok has made its way up and won the hearts of global mobile consumers despite facing political headwinds in the U.S. The app became the fourth most downloaded app surpassing Facebook-owned Instagram.
The company faces intense scrutiny from US lawmakers over privacy and security risks. According to Reuters TikTok has diversified its global growth by targeting users outside of its strongest market U.S.
It’s worth mentioning that TikTok isn’t the only Chinese app that made it to the top 10 list. Likee another short video app came seventh in the list performing better than the likes of Snapchat and Netflix. As a new entrant on the list, Likee focuses on markets such as India and Brazil and has more than 100 million monthly active users as of December. Facebook clean swept the top three positions with its Messenger app claiming the top spot, followed by Facebook and WhatsApp respectively.
According to App Annie, Mobile consumers around the world are expected to download a record of 120 billion apps via Apple’s App Store and Google Play in 2019, representing an increase of 5% from a year ago. Meanwhile, global consumers are poised to spend an estimated USD 90 billion on apps, up 15% from last year. This number only represents new downloads, not reinstalls or app updates.
App Annie found out that many of the most downloaded apps of 2019 are also the most downloaded apps of the decade.
There is no surprise that the spending growth was mainly driven by mobile games, photo and video editors and entertainment apps, which is, according to the report, expected to continue into 2020 with the launch of new streaming and subscription services.
Mobile apps have been the center of innovation for quite a few years now. With the ever-growing market and upcoming modern technologies, it’s very hard to stay relevant and competitive. As per Comscore’s yearly U.S. portable applications report, 57% of Americans spend more than half of their digital media consumption time on mobile apps.