News November 4, 2018

TikTok is fast becoming the most popular app in the world

Beijing-based video app TikTok is currently riding high, becoming the most-downloaded app in the US in September.

Back at the end of 2016, ByteDance launched their latest app, TikTok, which quickly became a popular app in the world of creating and sharing videos. Just over a year later, the company announced plans to merge with musical.ly, a similar app which became popular for the lip-sync videos it spawned.

Now, it seems as though TikTok and musical.ly’s August merger was worth it, with the app beating its rivals in terms of downloads last month.

As TechCrunch reports, TikTok has recently surpassed the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in terms of monthly downloads, reaching the top of the US App Store in the process.

The app, which allows users to share brief videos accompanied by music clips, is most popular amongst teenage users, and has experienced a meteoric rise in the last few months alone.

According to TechCrunch, the app saw a 31% increase from its previous month in September, reaching a total of 3.81 million installs, beating Facebook’s total of 3.53 million.

While the app boasted 1.13 million installs in the US back in October of 2017, it has since grown a massive 237%, making it one of the most-downloaded apps in the world.

Of course, the remaining question might be just why TikTok has become so popular in recent months.

As Apptopia notes, the easiest explanation for this growth comes from an increased amount of ad spending from the likes of Facebook, Google’s ADMob, and in-app platform Vungle. However, they also note that this growth might also be due to the face that the downloads from a number of seperate apps were combined during the musical.ly merger back in August.

Whatever the case, Facebook appear to be sweating this news somewhat, having recently announced plans to create their own competitor, Lasso.

While we’ll have to wait and see whether Lasso is a success, it remains to be seen whether TikTok’s recent growth is just a fluke, or whether they’ll continue to surpass some of social media’s biggest players in terms of downloads.