TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey" a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week too.

I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal. It's not fake.

My gut says it's a real trend, but the numbers are still juiced.

Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads. That's a lot of downloads.

Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world.

I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China.

If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company.

If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable.

At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.

So there's 抖音 and TikTok. They have completely seperate databases and installers (unlike WeChat). On IOS, if you are geolocated (or maybe it's locale restricted?) in the Chinese market then you can only download 抖音。If you are located in the international regions, then you will only find TikTok.

Since there is no Google Play Store in China, you will only find TikTok there [in the Play Store]. To install 抖音 you simply download the apk from their website and side-load it.

Since the article states

> TikTok has hit 1.5 billion total downloads across the App Store and Google Play

I believe that IOS has around 13% market share in China. So this is missing out on A LOT of downloads.

Then again it's hard to believe that there are 1.5 billion downloads for tiktok (ios + android) and 抖音(just ios). Then that must mean that it's not counting 抖音 downloads on Android.

> Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that.

GMail comes preinstalled in a lot of phones, and you can also use the service with different mail client, so you can't really compare two numbers and call that a day.