Instagram And TikTok Have Been Dethroned! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in March
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Catching Up?. Check out the full article for more insights.
March was a very interesting month in app downloads. I crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded apps in the world and was very surprised to see a new winner at the top that isn't Instagram or TikTok.
This hasn't happened in a while.
TikTok, which was the top app in February, was the third most downloaded app in the world in March. Appfigures Intelligence shows 45M fresh downloads during the month from the App Store and Google Play. Three million higher than February, which makes sense considering it's a short month and the ban in the US, and about a million shy of last March.
Instagram, which was the top app for much of 2024, came in second in March with 46M new estimated downloads. Also higher than February but a bunch lower than last March...
This pair owned the top position for a very long time, but thir reign may have ended. In March, the most downloaded app in the world was ChatGPT.
According to our estimates, ChatGPT saw 46M downloads - just a shade higher than Instagram before rounding - in March. It's interesting to see such growth from ChatGPT considering it's gotten a bunch of new competitors this year.
Downloads rose 28% between February and March, and are already 148% higher when comparing Q1 2025 to Q1 2024. While hockey-stick-like, this isn't a spike but rather a trend.
Facebook and WhatsApp round out the top five most downloaded apps in the world and given the rise of ChatGPT, this may be what the list will look like for months to come.
According to our estimates, the top 10 most downloaded apps in the world saw a total of 339M downloads in March. A good chunk higher than February but a little less than last March which means the negative trend of downloads continues. The Mobile Downloads Index agrees, down 14.9% so far this year.
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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.
