The app TikTok is rapidly growing.
The service that allows users to create 15-second dubbed videos, has surpassed 1 billion downloads on Apple's App Store and Google Play Store, according to a report by analytics company SensorTower, with a quarter of those downloads coming from India.
The company which looked at installs across the various versions of the iOS and Android app, said that the app gained more than 71 million new users during the month of January alone.
Owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, TikTok is popular, especially for younger generations, because of its easy-to-use system for recording videos overlaid with audio from mainstream music and movies.
With Bollywood’s influence on the pop culture, Tiktok which as a massive collection of audio clips from the country’s film industry, easily became popular for people in India.
A report by App Annie suggested that users' time spent on the video streaming apps grew about 185 percent over the past two years in India.
TikTok‘s pillars of success can be traced back to 2014, when apps like Musical.ly (which TikTok acquired in November 2017) and Dubsmash came into existence, helping people create ‘dubs’ on their phones.
And when Vine shut down its popular app for six-second videos in 2016, it created a void that TokTok quickly replaced.
This milestone is considered its massive push into global reign, aiming for growth in a category long dominated by Western firms including Facebook and Snap.
Read: How ByteDance Wants To Dominate, By Surpassing Facebook, Instagram And YouTube
While the figure is not inclusive of Android installs in China, approximately 663 million of these installs occurred in 2018. This makes the app the fourth most downloaded non-game app that year.
TikTok was third app globally in terms of new installs across both app stores during January, and was the first of non-game app in the United States. 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.
To put this into perspective, Facebook's app was installed an estimated 711 million times in 2018, and Instagram saw about 444 million new downloads.
Facebook and Instagram are still considerably larger, with billions of monthly active users between the two apps. But TikTok's massive growth is more than enough to get the Facebook's attention.
In November 2018, Facebook released its own TikTok clone, called 'Lasso', in an effort to capitalize on the music video app's popularity. Snapchat has also released a TikTok-esque 'Lens Challenge' feature where users can create lip sync videos.
Despite its massive popularity, TikTok has only just begun to make money.
At this moment, the app allows users to buy in-app gifts for live streamers, a feature that has received around $70 million to date, according to Sensor Tower's estimates. The app is also expected to begin expanding its advertising business.