The popular messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded more than 1 billion times worldwide. Data company Sensor Tower said that this application was launched at the end of 2013 and surpassed this milestone last Friday. As in the case of the application’s main competitor, WhatsApp, India is Telegram’s largest market, accounting for approximately 22% of its installations in the world’s second-largest Internet market.
Secondly, Russia and Indonesia accounted for 10% and 8% of [all installations], respectively. The app’s installations accelerated in 2021, reaching approximately 214.7 million installations in the first half of 2021, compared to the first half of 2020. The 133 million year-on-year growth of up to 61%.” Sensor Tower added.
It is worth noting that the number of installs is not the same as the active user base of the application. For example, as of the beginning of this year, Telegram has approximately 500 million monthly active users. The surge in downloads coincides with WhatsApp’s poor handling of communicating its privacy policy to its large user base, but it also shows that Telegram has received some additional attention in recent quarters.
Telegram raised more than $1 billion in funding earlier this year, making it the 15th app in the world to have reached or exceeded 1 billion downloads. Other apps on the list include WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, and Netflix. (Mobile research companies do not track the installation of most Google apps pre-installed on Android devices).
