Is TikTok’s rapid, global growth slowing down? App research firm SensorTower has put out some figures suggesting that it might. It claims that TikTok added 177 million ‘first-time users’ from Apple and Google’s app stores in the third quarter of this year. “That represents a 4% decline from a year ago. It’s the first time the hit app saw new installs drop on a quarterly basis,” reported Bloomberg.
Although the numbers are still impressive: so far this year, 564 million people have installed TikTok on their smartphones according to SensorTower, taking its life-time installs to 1.45bn. Bear in mind this is TikTok in the west, rather than its Chinese version Douyin.
SensorTower has also identified a possible reason for TikTok’s installs-growth slowing: the company appears to have cut back on the mammoth Facebook-ads campaign that fuelled its surge in late 2018 and early 2019.
In other TikTok news, the company has launched a new ‘TikTok for Developers’ program, with tools to integrate it into other apps. One of the first: a ‘Share to TikTok’ API which is already being used by a group of video-creation apps.
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