Google's video-sharing website YouTube has reached 5 billion downloads on the Google Play Store.
The video-sharing service was launched in 2015 and it also comes pre-installed on most Android device that have to the Google Play Store. This alone has greatly increased its popularity.
Last year, Google Play service was the first Android app to reach 5 billion downloads which was also due to the popularity of the Android OS.
Agreed. These apps are popular but their 5 billion downloads is due to their pre-installations on Android devices. Now when these pre-installed apps are activated by the Android user, it is being counted as a download.
Back then, Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone to be have the YouTube client, and it was featured in one of Apple's ads for the iPhone. Apple took permission from Google and built the YouTube player for the iPhone.
However, in 2002, Google decided that it will build the YouTube iOS app itself, and thus refused to renew the contract for Apple to build it, and so YouTube stopped coming pre-installed on iPhones. iOS users must download and install it.
There are other Google Android apps that have huge downloads counts too, these includes; Google Photos, Gboard, Google Search and Gmail. Each app has more than 1 billion installations.