Video app TikTok passes 1 billion downloads and is catching up with Facebook

TikTok, the app that mainly young people use to share music videos in which they lip-sync, is said to have been downloaded 1 billion times. According to market researcher SensorTower, TikTok is approaching the popularity of the Facebook app.

Of the 1 billion downloads of the social video app from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, 663 million took place in 2018. To put that in perspective, according to SensorTower, the Facebook app was installed 711 million times last year and was there were about 444 million downloads for Instagram during that period.

Excluding games, TikTok was the fourth most downloaded app of 2018. In January of this year, TikTok ranked third worldwide and was even the most downloaded non-game app in the United States. Last month, SensorTower added 71.3 million new users, noting that there are no figures available for Chinese Android users.

TikTok is especially popular in Asia, according to the figures of the market researcher. India, for example, accounts for 25 percent of all downloads to date. In January, 43 percent of new users came from India; a year earlier this was only 9.5 percent.

The increasing popularity of TikTok, which was previously called Musically, has not gone unnoticed by other social media platforms. Facebook is currently working on its own playback app. It is not yet known when it will be released.