TikTok hits 2 bn downloads globally; India leads rally

Short format video app TikTok has been downloaded two billion times globally, according to a report from app intelligence platform Sensor Tower. 

Data from the App Store and Google Play Store were taken into account for the study, the report said.

India was the biggest driver of growth for the app, owned by Beijing headquartered ByteDance, accounting for 30.3% of the total downloads at 611 million, it said. In second place was China -- where the app is called Douyin -- which garnered 9.7% of the total downloads at 196.6 million, it added. The third largest market was the US, with 165 million downloads, it said.

The surge in numbers is largely due to the increased use of smartphones due to the Covid-19 lockdown, the report said. 

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According to data shared by Sensor Tower for the first quarter of 2020, TikTok recorded 1.5 billion downloads by March 31, 2020. The first months of 2020 saw 315 million installs across the App Store and Google Play Store. 

Google Play Store has so far contributed to 75.5% of total installs of the app. 

The short-format video app has had a roller-coaster ride in India. In April 2019, it was at the receiving end of a court order banning the app temporarily in India. Although the order was reversed within a week, the app claimed that the decision had caused losses amounting to $500,000 per day.

Following this, the app had introduced a feature to ensure that its users were over 13 years of age and announced that it had taken down six million videos that violated community guidelines from July 2018 to April 2019.

A recent report by Israel-based cyber security solutions provider Check Point uncovered multiple vulnerabilities in TikTok, which the company claims to have rectified. 

In a transparency report shared by TikTok in January, it received the maximum number of takedown requests from India during 2019. The app has over 120 million monthly active users in the country and over 200 million total users.