TikTok Surpasses One Billion Installs on the App Store and Google Play

Social video app TikTok from Beijing's ByteDance has just hit another major milestone in its global push to disrupt a category long dominated by Western firms including Facebook and Snap.

According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence estimates, the app has just crossed the one billion mark for worldwide installs on the App Store and Google Play, including its lite versions and regional variations. This figure is not inclusive of Android installs in China. Approximately 663 million of these installs occurred in 2018. To put this into perspective, the Facebook app was installed an estimated 711 million times last year and Instagram saw about 444 million new downloads.

The fourth most downloaded non-game app for all of 2018, TikTok was the No. 3 app globally in terms of new installs across both stores during January, and was the No. 1 non-game app in the United States last month. Its total new users for January reached 71.3 million worldwide, again excluding Android users in China, which was 2.6 times or 161 percent more than it saw in January 2018.

Twenty-five percent of TikTok's downloads to date have come from India, for an estimated total of 250 million there. Last month, 43 percent of the app's new users were from India, compared to just 9.5 percent in January of 2018. The share of new users from the U.S. has grown year-over-year as well, just less significantly. We estimate that 9 percent of the app's January installs came from the U.S. versus 5.6 percent the previous year. Total U.S. installs of the app so far stand at more than 96 million.