New data unveils most popular apps of 2021

Research from Gravitee.io reveals who's winning the war for your smartphone

The top three most popular apps globally are TikTok, Meta (previously known as Facebook) and Instagram, according to new data.

API tooling firm Gravitee.io created a website showing how the 15 most-popular apps in the US are growing, and how their download rates compare with one another.

TikTok is a social media platform allowing users to share short videos. It was previouslly called Musically before Chinese company Bytedance purchased it for $50 billion and rebranded it to TikTok. It rose to populatity in 2018 and, according to Gravitee.io, has over 834 million downloads at the time of writing. This means that more people have downloaded TikTok than live in Europe.

Facebook is also a social media platform, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 while he was attending Harvard University. It has since grown to be one of the world's most popular sites. On 28th October 2021 Facebook (the company) announced its rebranding to Meta, although the app is still called Facebook. The app has over 680 million downloads globally, more than ten times the population of the United Kingdom.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently ordered Facebook to sell animated image platform Giphy, after a probe suggested the acquisition could harm social media users and UK advertisers.

The final app on the list, Instagram, is another social media platfrom, focused on enabling users to share photos and videos. It was created by Kevin Systrom in 2010, then bought by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012, for $1 billion. The most followed Instgram account belongs to Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. Instgram has over 580 million downloads: slightly more than the entire population of North America.