TikTok has beaten Facebook and is already the most downloaded application in the world

Was expected. The growing popularity of TikTok has not suffered any setbacks or drops since it began to emerge in late 2019. The short video social network and app has grown by leaps and bounds in recent months; However, now it has finally managed to beat the three most famous applications in the West: Facebook , Instagram and WhatsApp .

As revealed by the Nikkei Asia portal , the ByteDance app has just been crowned the most downloaded application in the world and has displaced Facebook from the throne it held for many years.

TikTok first appeared in China in September 2016, but its global launch only occurred in 2017, when it was launched on the official iOS and Android platforms . In August 2018 it was already available worldwide.

According to the revealed data, the ByteDance app was the first to achieve the milestone of 3 billion downloads. Its popularity skyrocketed with the coronavirus pandemic and even many other social networks and platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have tried to emulate the formula for its success: short videos.

It should be noted that – unlike some other examples of networks with fleeting success – it has made efforts to stay current at the top of applications in the world. His concept of shorts was almost identical to what was at the time Vine (a social network of shorts that died in 2017). However, over time, the ByteDance app was able to expand its concept to include educational clips , life-hacks , tutorials , etc.

The popularity of TikTok is evidenced by the interest that many companies showed during 2020, and the rise of competing concepts such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts show that short videos are here to stay.

Beyond positive aspects, the app has not been far from controversy and was constantly attacked for its privacy policies (it was even accused of serving as an espionage app for the Chinese government, amid the tensions between that country and the West) .

The top shared by Nikkei Asia shows that TikTok ranks first in most downloaded applications (it ranked fourth in 2019), followed, in that order: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, Likee, Pinterest and Twitter