TikTok threatens Facebook's hegemony, surpasses 1 billion installs on iOS and Android

TikTok, the app which allows millions of teenagers to bask in their own glory for 15 seconds at a time by lip-synching to popular music videos and sharing the clips with friends has become the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the first half of 2018, according to market analysis firm Sensor Tower, beating out titans like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.The site, owned by China's ByteDance, boasted of 500 million users as of June following the purchase last year of Musical.ly, which greatly expanded TikTok's reach in the US.Now, TikTok has surpassed the 500 million mark and has hit more than 1 billion downloads on both Android and iOS.As per data released by Sensor Tower, the app is now competing with Facebook.[caption id="attachment_6165981" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

Representational image. Image: Reuters[/caption]"Approximately 663 million of these installs occurred in 2018," Sensor Tower founder Oliver Yeh said in a blog post. "To put this into perspective, the Facebook app was installed an estimated 711 million times last year and Instagram saw about 444 million new downloads."The installs have been increasing in Asian countries, especially in India. "Twenty-five percent of TikTok’s downloads to date have come from India, for an estimated total of 250 million there. Last month, 43 percent of the app’s new users were from India, compared to just 9.5 percent in January of 2018." The total US installs of the app so far standing at more than 96 million. Also, the non-game app stood first in the US last month.TikTok's total new users for January reached 71.3 million worldwide, excluding Android users in China where the app is known as Douyin.But the app, as with other social media giants, has recently come under fire with claims that it was a "hunting ground" for abusers, as per a report in CNET. Recently, the Tamil Nadu government also asked the central government to ban the app.