As one would expect, the five billion+ download club, according to Google Play, is dominated by Google’s apps: YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and the like are found on most Android devices. The only entries not from the company’s stable had been the Facebook app, which passed that number in 2019, and WhatsApp when it joined the list in early 2020.
Android Police reports that Facebook Messenger has just become the third Facebook app to have been downloaded more than five billion times on Android across its lifetime. It was never in doubt that the app would join its siblings in boasting this distinction; according to Statista, it has the second-highest number of monthly active users—1.3 billion—after WhatsApp’s 2 billion (as of January 2021).
