Most Downloaded Apps
With the number of social media users worldwide rising year after year, and estimated to be 5.17 billion in 2024, it should come as no surprise that social media apps currently rank among the most downloaded apps.
As it stands, seven of the 10 most downloaded apps in the United States are social media apps. What does this ranking look like on a global level? In other words, what is the most downloaded app worldwide? Here’s a look at the latest app download rankings.
10 most downloaded apps: Q3 2023
A recent analysis of app download rankings in the third quarter of 2023 shows that much like the US’s list, social media apps also heavily dominate the global charts. Threads, a text-based conversation app launched by Meta that experts say is meant to rival X (formerly known as Twitter), is the most downloaded app in the world. Launched in the summer of 2023, the app received a record-breaking 150 million downloads in less than a week, making it the app to reach this milestone in the shortest amount of time.
Second on the app download rankings in Q3 2023 is TikTok. The popular social media network also has the honor of being the app on which users spend the most money. It is also the fourth-most used app in terms of time spent, after YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
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The next three on the list are all Meta-owned entities, which highlights the company’s dominance in social media. Instagram is in third place, followed by WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app both in the United States and worldwide. Facebook rounds out the five most downloaded apps in the world.
Following this tranche of Meta-owned networks is CapCut, a video editing app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. The app has been downloaded more than half a billion times on Google Play alone.
Telegram ranks next, in seventh place, followed by Snapchat. Meta’s WhatsApp app for businesses is the ninth-most downloaded app of the quarter and is ahead of shopping app Temu, which rounds out the 10 most downloaded apps worldwide.
Of these 10 apps, half belong to the Meta empire. As many as eight are categorized as social media or messaging apps—the only two not in this category are CapCut and Temu.