Facebook is What??? The Most Downloaded Apps in March

This isn't an April's fool's joke - Facebook was the most downloaded app in the world in March.

I crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded apps in the App Store, Google Play, and combined in March and here are the results:

Facebook was the most downloaded app in the world in March, bringing in a combined 59M new downloads from the App Store and Google Play, according to our App Intelligence. The vast majority of those, 52M (88%), came from Google Play.

The cause for the spike was not Facebook becoming cool overnight, or nostalgia, but rather Facebook going down for a few hours. That gives us an interesting insight into how Facebook is used these days - The web!

Because we're looking at an estimate of new installs, downloads going up when the platform goes down means web users downloaded the mobile app to see if they can get access that way.

This aligns with a similar theory I had about Bluesky's usage after it opened up to the public back in February.

I looked at the daily downloads trend for Instagram, the second most downloaded app in the world in March with 58M estimated downloads - which also went down on March 5th - and didn't see a spike because you can't really use Instagram on the web.

TikTok came in third in March with 46M estimated downloads, a smidge up from February.

WhatsApp and Telegram round out the top 5 in March, both finishing strong with more downloads when compared to February.

And here's an interesting tidbit - With Threads, ranked 6th overall, Meta now owns 6 of the 10 most downloaded apps in the world.

Our App Intelligence shows that together, the top 10 most downloaded apps in the world added 345M new downloads in March from the App Store and Google Play - roughly 10% higher than February's total.