India leads Zoom, TikTok downloads in April: Sensor Tower

Video conferencing platform Zoom and short video sharing application TikTok saw most of their downloads in April from India, according to a report.

India accounted for 18.2% of the 131 million downloads that San Jose, California-based Zoom Video Communications-owned platform witnessed in April, mobile marketing analytics firm Sensor Tower said. 

TikTok, run by Beijing headquartered ByteDance, was installed 107 million times in the same month, 22% of which was from India, it added. 

While Zoom topped the list of non-game app downloads worldwide, TikTok took the second spot. Covid-19 contact tracing app Aarogya Setu also made it to the global top 10 at number seven.

The development comes at a time when countries worldwide, including India, have provided cybersecurity advisories on the use of Zoom, terming the platform as “not safe”. Its security loopholes have also been identified by other authorities and regulators, globally.

To address these issues, the company acquired end-to-end encrypted chat and file-sharing platform provider Keybase on Thursday to introduce end-to-end encryption. Last month, it also released a security update to tackle Zoombombing,  a term used to describe instances where unknown users join and interrupt meetings on the platform to post lewd messages and hate speech.

Read: What are the chief security concerns with Zoom and have they been fixed?

TikTok, on the other hand, has followed a trajectory of popularity despite facing regulatory hurdles in the country. Sensor Tower had said in a separate report that as of April-end, India accounted for over 30% of its two billion global downloads. The surge in numbers was largely due to the increased use of smartphones during lockdown, it said.

Read: Coronavirus India LIVE updates