India accounts for the highest number of social app downloads globally: App Annie

• The most number of social app downloads in the first half of 2021 were from India.
• India also ranked second for the most hours spent in social apps just behind China.
• The App Annie report shows how live streaming and short video content are leading the trends in social apps.

India is currently the biggest market for social apps globally in terms of downloads, according to App Annie’s ‘Evolution of Social Apps’ report. India also takes second place for the most hours spent in social apps. The report highlights how livestreaming is the latest trend in social media and shares statistics on which apps are doing the best and in which markets.

According to the report, Asia accounted for the most number of downloads of social apps in the first half of 2021 dominating 60% of the overall market. India is far ahead in the race with over 1.5 billion downloads. It actually has been leading the race surpassing the US in 2018, the report added. Globally, 70 billion social apps have been downloaded to date since 2010. In the first half of 2021 alone, there were 4.7 billion downloads of social apps. This data has been calculated from the App Store and Google Play Store and for social, social networking and communication apps.


The most downloaded social and entertainment apps in India are MX TakaTak, Instagram, Josh, Moj and Snapchat. Among the top five apps, MX TakaTak, Josh and Moj are TikTok-like short video apps. App Annie highlighted how apps like TikTok, MX TakaTak and Snapchat offering short video content and live streaming have dramatically increased.

According to the report, there were 740 billion hours spent on social apps in the first half of this year. This accounted for 44% of the time spent on mobile globally. The report adds that there has been steady growth in the past three years.


App Annie predicts that the total time spent in social apps with live streaming in focus is set to surpass half a trillion hours on Android phones alone. In India, people spent almost 160 billion hours on social apps this year on the Android platform. The top five apps that Indians are spending time on are YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Truecaller.

YouTube continues to remain the leader not just in India but globally as well. App Annie credits the platform’s “depth and breadth of engagement” as the reasons behind it ranking first in streaming and video. But TikTok could soon emerge as the leader in this space as it has already crossed YouTube in terms of average time spent per user in the US and UK.

In terms of consumer spending, the most popular apps in India are Hotstar, Chamet, Tango Live, Truecaller and ZEE5. Chamet is a one-on-one multiplayer video and voice chat app that lets you connect with people from around the world. Tango Live is a social live streaming app where people get paid for hosting live videos. India, however, is not among the top countries when it comes to consumer spending ranking 17th in the list. The US has the highest consumer spend accounting for 30% of the total market.

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