India's TikTok Ban Cost the App At Least 15 Million New Users There—and Its Biggest Month Yet

Nearly two weeks after it was removed from the App Store and Google Play in India, ByteDance's social video app TikTok is available again in its largest market. Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data reveals that the removal delivered a significant blow to the app's user growth there, bringing to a halt what was poised to be its best month yet in the country.

Based on historical performance and our projections, Sensor Tower estimates that TikTok missed out on more than 15 million first-time users in India across both stores during the period the ban was in effect, or about three times as many as the app added in all of April 2018. We now expect worldwide TikTok installs for April to come in about 33 percent under March's total of nearly 60 million as the result of the ban. Before the ban, TikTok was tracking to surpass 33 million new users there in April, which would have surmounted December 2018 as its best month yet in the market.

Despite the brakes having been put on its growth in India, we expect TikTok to rebound quickly from this situation given its popularity and user base there, which were able to continue using the app despite its ban. We show that TikTok has quickly returned to the top 10 on India's App Store following its reinstatement, currently ranking No. 1 in the Photo & Video category and No. 6 overall. The app has returned to the Google Play charts at No. 131 overall and is rising fast.