Instagram explosion

It's been a while since I looked at download trends for Instagram. Why, you ask? Because they've been pretty flat for a looooong time now. Instagram is very popular, gets a lot of downloads every day, and it's been around long enough that growth is much harder to achieve than its younger rival, TikTok.

Well...

That could change in July!

For Instagram, the last week of June and first week of July saw higher downloads than any other week this year, last year, and even going back to the beginning of 2018.

Downloads for the week of 6/28 topped 15.2M, a whopping 60% increase over the average weekly downloads this year, according to our estimates. The week after, 7/5, downloads remained high at 14.5M and are looking very strong this week as well.

FYI - These include downloads of Instagram and Instagram Lite.

But, how? India. Instagram's download surge comes mainly from India, where TikTok has now been banned for about a year. Several local competitors like Josh are trying to fill TikTok's gap and are gaining momentum, but that just means more opportunity for Instagram.

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