WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging app for Android, now has over five billion downloads. This is the second non-Google app to reach this milestone. Like most Android applications reaching large-scale installs, this number includes not only downloads from the Play Store but pre-installed apps from smartphones companies like Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, Redmi etc.

According to Stats, WhatsApp is the most popular worldwide mobile messenger application. It has about 1.6 billion monthly active users. In 2019, Facebook Messenger had 1.3 billion users and WeChat had 1.1 billion users.

According to the Google Play Store, South Korea was the fastest-growing WhatsApp market, with the mobile messaging app. Downloads have increased by almost 56 per cent in 2019. Additionally, for the first time in five years, Google has not chosen Facebook as the best publisher of mobile processors.

Analytics firm Sensor Tower recently revealed that Google collected more than 850 million downloads in the last quarter of 2019, compared to Facebook’s nearly 800 million. In terms of overall downloads for the year, Google still lags behind Facebook.

While Google received nearly 2.3 billion downloads, Facebook received nearly 3 billion downloads in the last 12 months. Of the top five most downloaded applications worldwide, four holds by Facebook: WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

TikTok, the video-sharing processor owned by Byte Dance, is the second most downloaded program in the world in 2019.