Just like the U.S., the Indian government has been clamping down on Chinese companies citing national security. As of now, hundreds of Chinese apps can not be used in India and the country is banning more. Due to this trouble, some of these companies are forced to consider selling their Indian business to local competitors. Over the past few days, there have been reports that ByteDance will sell TikTok‘s Indian business to a local competitor, Glance.
For ByteDance, it has since said that it will not comment on non-official reports. Now, the latest report out of China claims that TikTok is not selling its business in India. TikTok India still belongs to ByteDance and the company is not selling, the report claims
A recent Bloomberg report claims that Bytedance is exploring the sale of TikTok’s Indian business to rival, Glance. According to reports, this negotiation was initiated by Japan’s SoftBank Group. Glance’s parent company and mobile advertising technology company, InMobi, also owns the short video app Roposo. The popularity of this app in India skyrocketed after the ban on TikTok in July last year.
ByteDance laid off more than 2,000 of its Indian team last month and stated in a company memo that it was not sure whether it would resume business in India.
TikTok continues to top the ranks for most downloaded app globally
SensorTower, a well-known mobile application data analysis company, recently shared its top 10 apps in terms of downloads and revenues. According to the company, the non-gaming app with the highest global revenue in October is TikTok. The Chinese app records user expenditures of more than $115 million, which is 6.2 times its October 2019 revenue. About 86% of TikTok’s revenue comes from Douyin, 8% is from the US, and 2% from Turkey.
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TikTok ranks highly
You can see the full ranking of the most profitable non-gaming apps in October 2020 is below. App revenue estimates come from Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform.
Google’s YouTube is the world’s second-highest non-gaming application in October 2020. It has a total revenue exceeding $94 million, a year-on-year increase of 58% relative to October 2019. About 56% of YouTube’s revenue comes from the United States, and 11% from Japan. The next application is Tinder, then Tencent Video and Disney+.
In terms of downloads, TikTok still occupies the top position. In October 2020 alone, the Chinese short video app has up to 66 million downloads. This is an increase of 9.5% relative to the same period of last year.
Like we will expect, most of its downloads are from its Chinese version, Douyin. It accounts for 12% (China) of its total downloads. However, the app still records massive downloads from countries like Brazil. According to SensorTower, its download from Brazil is about 10%.
As of October 2020, the top 10 downloads of non-gaming applications worldwide are shown in the figure below. App download estimates come from Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform.
WhatsApp is the second-most downloaded non-gaming application in the world last month. This popular messaging app has a total of 57 million installs. The country with the most Whatsapp installs is India with 30%. African giant and the most populous black nation with almost 200 million population, Nigeria, is second with about 10%. Apparently, WhatsApp is very popular in sub-Sahara Africa.
Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom rank in the top five non-gaming applications with the most installs worldwide in October 2020.
