TikTok surpasses Instagram as most-downloaded app in 2022

TikTok was the most downloaded app in the first three months of 2022, managing to beat Instagram to the top spot.

Within the past few years, TikTok has stormed through the ranks and become one of the most popular social media apps in the world, rivaling some of the industry giants like Instagram.

The short-form video app allows clips up to ten minutes long, which users can browse using the algorithm-based For You Page that can often have people scrolling for hours.

And it seems that this rapid growth isn’t slowing down. According to Sensor Tower’s ‘Q1 2022: Store Intelligence Data Digest,’ TikTok was the most downloaded app in the first three months of 2022.

In Q1 2021, TikTok surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads, “becoming just the fifth app (and the only one not owned by Meta) to cross this threshold.” The report also claimed that, “no app has had more downloads than TikTok since the start of 2018.”

In the first three months of 2022, TikTok has been downloaded over 175 million times, beating out apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

• Read More: MrBeast reveals insane amount of money he lost in Feastables giveaway

For Q4 2021, Instagram narrowly beat TikTok in terms of downloads, but TikTok has now well surpassed the popular image & video sharing platform.

That wasn’t the only success for ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, in the first quarter of 2022. Their other app CapCut, a video editing platform through which many edit the videos they go on to upload to TikTok, had its “best quarter to date” with over 30 million downloads.

TikTok has become so popular that it’s having an enormous effect on the direction of many social media platforms, with Instagram implementing its own TikTok style ‘Reels’ feature in an attempt to capitalize on the growing preference for short-form video content.

With TikTok adding its own ‘Stories’ feature, it looks like these two platforms could be set to compete for a while.