A few apps have hit a billion installs across the app stores. Even fewer is the exclusive 5 billion club which only a handful of apps can boast to have accomplished. WhatsApp is the new member to this club.
WhatsApp is now the second non-Google app to reach the 5 billion installs milestone which is a huge deal. It is a messaging service that is used by over 1.5 billion users monthly and it follows Facebook as the other non Google app to reach this milestone.
WhatsApp is also the 10th app to break the 5 billion installs milestone. The other apps include:
- Google Play Services
- Google Maps
- Google Text to Speech
- Gmail
- Google Chrome
- Google Play Music
- YouTube
Google Apps find it easy to reach such huge milestones since they are preinstalled as part of the Android experience. There are over 2.5 billion active Android devices as of May 2019. This excludes the fact that a country with a large population like China has blocked the use of Google apps in the country. Facebok has done very well with its own apps, probably thanks to its bundling partnership with the likes of Samsung and Huawei that have drived its installs up.
On Android, there are over 30 apps that have between 1 billion and 5 billion installs and they are dominated by Google and Facebook. This won’t change anytime soon as the two companies dominate a huge market share in the Internet. An app store like Google Play has less than 150,000 apps with over 100,000 installs as an example.
