The Most Downloaded Apps in December

Ariel Ariel
1/21/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #97 - Look at Them Grow!. Check out the full article for more insights.


December, the month for many apps and games, is behind us. I rounded up the most downloaded apps in the world and ranked them for you.

Let's dive right in:

Instagram was the most downloaded app in the world in December of 2021, making its way into nearly 60 million new devices across the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates.

TikTok was right behind it with 51 million estimated downloads, in a battle we've seen go back a few months now. A battle TikTok would win comfortably if the app wasn't banned in India...

Speaking of India, Meesho, a shopping app for India, has had its best month of downloads, reaching the #3 most downloaded app in the world. Even though it's only targeting India. That's a lot of downloads!

Meta's remaining champions, Facebook and WhatsApp, were the 4th and 5th most downloaded apps in December.

The one app we keep seeing more of over the last few months is Capcut, TikTok's video editor. I talked about it more than once, and I think it's showing a big trend that many video editor apps, which monetize very well, are not very happy about.

Our estimates show that together, the top 10 most downloaded apps in the world in December were downloaded 363M times. About 10% higher than November but with pretty much all the same players.

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The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.


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