The popular video-sharing social network, TikTok has surpassed the 2 billion download mark, five months after it hit the 1.5 billion according to a report from SensorTower.
These are cumulative downloads from both the Google Play and App Store without accounting for downloads from third-party stores. The majority of the downloads are coming from India, China, and the US, where the app seems to be more popular.
Much of this latest growth is attributed to the coronavirus pandemic given the conditions created by lockdowns and restricted movements. People have found solace in such apps to avoid boredom and to stay entertained, especially the millennials.
A similar trend has been observed with other entertainment apps, though TikTok is now in an exclusive 2 billion territory.
The graph below highlights its download growth over the past 3 years.
What exactly is TikTok?
TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by Byte dance. Interestingly, it goes by Douyin in China but TikTok for the rest of the world.
It is mostly used to create short videos, lip-syncing videos of between 3 -15 secs, and short looping videos of 3 – 60 secs among others. Lip-Sync is its most famous feature but users can also jump onto trending hashtags on the app, trending is the new way of keeping up and following the vibe. The app allows you to compete in the different challenges which can be entered via the trending hashtags on the app under its discovery tab. You can read more about it here.
What does the 2 billion download mark mean?
The 2 billion download count is no easy feat to achieve but TikTok has done it eclipsing other apps into the 2 billion territory. It being popular in one of the world’s most populous countries like India & China has, of course, helped it to achieve this. However, make no mistake, these downloads don’t represent active usage.
India is said to have contributed over 611 million downloads to date followed by China at 196.6 million. The majority of these downloads have been through the Google Playstore with over 1.5 billion originating from it.
These new numbers have also helped push up its lifetime user spending to over $456.7 million with 72.3% of that coming from China followed by the US at 19%.
