At the end of 2021, TikTok had slipped down from its first-place standing. According to a ranking, the Chinese social network was outdone by Instagram.
The controversies didn’t slow down Instagram’s march to glory. According to the Sensor Tower report for the last quarter of 2021, the social network of the Meta group finished at the top of the most downloaded applications in the world during the last quarter of last year.
The Adam Moseri-helmed platform even managed to do better than the previous quarter with 10% more downloads, says the study. A victory for Mark Zuckerberg’s group, which had not seen one of its applications rise to the top of this ranking since WhatsApp in the last quarter of 2019. Facebook even took third place in the top global apps.
This is the second time that TikTok has not come first in the global rankings. The Chinese social network was surpassed in the second quarter of 2020 by Zoom, whose use was boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic and physical distancing measures.
TikTok still came second in the ranking of the most downloaded apps in the world at the end of 2021 and even took first place on the App Store while having to settle for third place on Google Play. Instagram, on the other hand, was in the lead on Google Play but only in fourth on the App Store.
Instagram’s resurgence can be explained in some part by the ban of TikTok in India, which benefited the American giant starting in the second quarter of 2020. Instagram downloads in India increased by 135% from Q2 2020 to Q4 2021, Sensor Tower noted. Instagram is gaining traction in the Asian market while TikTok is preferred in Europe.
In Q4 2021, there were 36.1 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play, mostly dominated by Android users with 27.8 billion downloads worldwide compared to 8.3 billion for iOS fans. JB
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