App analytics firm Sensor Tower has published its year-end report on the apps market in 2019.
Among its conclusions: TikTok was the second most-downloaded app across Apple and Google’s app stores in 2019, behind only WhatsApp, with nearly 750m downloads over the year.
TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming.
It is used to create short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android for markets outside of China
That put TikTok ahead of Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, with the caveat that as longer-established apps, they would have already been installed on hundreds of millions of smartphones before the year got underway.
Spotify ranks 12th and YouTube Music 13th in Sensor Tower’s list. Bytedance also ranked third in Sensor Tower’s list of the top app publishers in 2019, behind only Facebook and Google.
There are plenty more stats on TikTok in Sensor Tower’s report, including the claim that India accounted for nearly 45% of TikTok’s ‘first-time’ downloads in 2019; that Brazil overtook the US and China for quarterly TikTok downloads last year; but that China accounted for 78% of the app’s [in-app purchases] revenue in the final quarter of the year.