I bet you won’t guess what the most downloaded Android app was in 2023. Hint, it’s not TikTok. It’s not Facebook, nor Whatsapp. The most downloaded app of 2023 (for Android that is) was Instagram.
I admit, I thought I’d find out in January the top of the most downloaded apps for 2023, but I guess March is ok too. Anyway, my first big surprise is the fact that it’s not TikTok the most downloaded Android app. I honestly thought that’s the one, because everywhere I look there’s TikTok this, TikTok that. I’m happy to report that TikTok was on the 2nd place. The first place is occupied by Instagram. For some reason I thought Instagram went out of fashion or something just like Facebook, but I guess due to the fact that they’ve added some functionality that TikTok had helped increase its popularity.
The total number of downloads for Instagram (Android alone) increased by 20% in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching 768 million downloads. The information comes from the market analysis firm Statista.
TikTok on the other hand recorded 733 million downloads in 2023, with an increase of only 4% compared to the previous year. It’s strange but stats show that Instagram is successful in targeting new users, even after all these years. I guess the fact that Instagram launched the “Reels” feature back in in 2020, a function that allows the sharing of short clips just like TikTok, helped a lot in keeping up with the young users.
Meanwhile, the best news is the fact that the Chinese app (TikTok), which I have the lowest respect for because it allows all sort of crap to be shared, slowed down its growth for the first time since 2016. Instagram reached 1.47 billion monthly active users, with an increase of 13 million in the final quarter of 2023. However, if TikTok excels at something, it’s at the number of hours spent in the application by its users: 95 minutes on average on TikTok versus 62 minutes spent on average on Instagram. By comparison X (ex-Twitter) has 30 minutes and Snapchat only 19 minutes. Statista’s top of the most downloaded apps in 2023 shows this:
- TikTok
- CapCut
- Threads
- Temu
- Telegram
- Snapchat
- Spotify
CapCut is on the 5th place, and to be honest I didn’t know about it until today. Apparently it’s so popular because it’s launched by the dev that makes TikTok. CapCut, formerly known as JianYing, is a Chinese short-form video editing app developed by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
