The mobile apps has impacted our lives to a huge extent. In barely a decade, it went from a luxury to a necessity. One of the fastest-growing categories in smartphone apps is entertainment. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and a slew of other platforms have become not only a source of entertainment but also a source of earning money.
Despite the ban in few major markets, multiple privacy lawsuits, and its unending acquisition tale, TikTok has been winning people’s heart ever since it got launched. And once again, TikTok emerged as the most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide for the fourth consecutive month – May 2021.
According to Sensor Tower, the short-video sharing app recorded more than 80 million installs in the month of May. To stay ahead of the market, ByteDance has recently added new features for creators on its platform. The popular ‘Music Visualizer’ is one of them.
The countries with the largest number of TikTok installs on both App Store and Google Play were Brazil (16%) and Douyin in China (12%).
Facebook is the second most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide, with more than 53 million installs. The biggest push came from India, which accounted for 27% of all Facebook installs in May 2021. This is followed by the US which accounted for 7% of the total installs as the market is already saturated.
It is important to note that, APAC has been the biggest market for the social media giant in terms of the daily and monthly active users. India remains the fast-growing market for Facebook, with over 310 million users.
Four out of top 5 most installed apps worldwide (non-gaming) belonged to Facebook’s family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. This trend was similar in the month of March and April 2021.
The video calling app Zoom made it into the top ten most downloaded non-gaming apps on both App Store and Google Play. The company keeps adding new features on Zoom app to attract more customers. The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the Zoom app’s rapid surge in installs worldwide.
Due to the Covid-19 lockdown across the world, companies have shifted to video conferencing for all office meetings, events, and other networking programs. Indeed, following Zoom’s enormous success, companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google have begun to invest heavily in the video conferencing market, with apps such as Google Meet, Skype, Messenger Desktop app, WhatsApp video calling, and so on.
As the world is fast syncing into smartphones, the adoption of apps is all time high. People are replying on apps more than ever and spending more time on apps than ever before.
Staying connected during the pandemic, and on-demand entertainment during the lockdown has brought people closer to Facebook’s family of apps. In many developing countries like Africa, where the 4G connectivity is now becoming a norm, usage of apps has has reached to all time high.
The aforementioned report listing the most downloaded apps in May for the non-gaming category on Google Play as well as Apple App Store, clearly paints a picture of the blossoming infotainment era.
