TikTok from ByteDance has proven itself, and to the world, that it is once again a phenomenon.
After surpassing the 1 billion users milestone and becoming one of the fastest growing platform on the internet, the Chinese app has surpassed Facebook to become second only after WhatsApp as the most downloaded app in 2019.
A year later, the short-video app went even further leaving Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms and became the most downloaded app in the U.S. in January 2020.
The app surpassed Instagram, Netflix, Disney+, YouTube, Snapchat and others, by margins.
According to data from Sensor Tower, TikTok has been downloaded 104 million times on the Google Play Store and Apple app store in January 2020 alone.
This is a massive 46% increase over the same period last year. It also shows a healthy 27% increase when compared to the total downloads in December 2019.
ByteDance had previously launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016.
As the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, Douyin saw the fist decline in its in-app purchases in January. However, it managed to reach its peak, and recover during the Spring Festival holidays.
TikTok and Douyin are similar to each other, but they run on separate servers to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.
TikTok was also the most downloaded app in the U.S. in October 2018, and regarded as the first Chinese app to ever achieve this. In 2019, TikTok was declared the 7th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.
Looking from the stats, it can be pretty clear that ByteDance is going continue its reign in the foreseeable future of social media networks.
With more users coming overseas that include emerging markets, the platform would continue experiencing consecutive growth every month.
As for globally, Toutiao was the most downloaded news app worldwide for January 2020 with 6.3 million installs.
Also called Jinri Toutiao, the app is a news and information content platform, a product also from ByteDance. China accounted for more than 99% of these downloads.
Sitting at second place, was Public with 2.6 million installs. The app that gathers information about the local city users are staying at, surpassed Cricbuzz, News Break, and Tencent News.
To create the stats, Sensor Tower said that it uses Store Intelligence.
The algorithm analyzes "hundreds of millions of data points" to enable deep and actionable insight into both the App Store and Google Play.
With it, Sensor Tower can gather web-based analysis of downloads and revenue estimates for millions of apps, thousands of publishers, on all major countries and categories.
Further reading: Becoming Increasingly Popular, TikTok Wants To Distance Itself From The Chinese Government