Blog

Dailyhunt’s short video app Josh, which launched a year ago, is the only Indian app to feature in the Top 10 of App Store and Play Store downloads in May 2021.

It was the world’s 10th most downloaded app overall, and eighth most downloaded on Play Store, according to recent data from Sensor Tower.

TikTok, which is synonymous with short video creation, was the most downloaded app across app stores, with 80 million installs.

Incidentally, Josh was launched shortly after the Indian government’s ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps — an event that saw a plethora of homegrown short-video apps flooding the market. Josh’s peers in India include InMobi’s Roposo, MX TakaTak, ShareChat’s Moj, Chingari, Mitron TV, Bolo Indya, and others.

Overall, social media apps dominated the top 10 downloaded apps in May.

Facebook was the second most installed non-gaming app worldwide, with more than 53 million installs. India accounted for the highest share of Facebook downloads at 27 percent, followed by the US at 7 percent.

Other Facebook-owned apps Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger rounded off the top five most installed non-gaming apps in the world.

Growth of Josh

Josh became a hit soon after its launch in September 2020, crossing 50 million downloads and one billion video plays in 45 days.

Dailyhunt Co-founder Umang Bedi told YS in an earlier interaction,

“We reached 23 million daily active users in a matter of 45 days of our beta launch. Right now, the local language market is ovulating. Here we have a great product, and we are putting our neck out and rising to the Prime Minister’s call for an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.”

Last December, Dailyhunt turned unicorn after raising $100 million led by AlphaWave, Google, and Microsoft. It plans to use the capital to scale up Josh, augment its local language content offerings, build the indigenous content creator ecosystem.

Josh — which is available in 12 local languages — wants to become a platform to promote India’s heritage and culture, Dailyhunt said in a prior statement. The app has around 77 million MAUs, 36 million DAUs, and more than 1.5 billion video plays per day.

Overall, India’s short video market is estimated to have grown from 20 million users in 2016 to 180 million in 2020, according to a RedSeer report. It is projected to grow 4X to touch 400-450 billion minutes or video plays a month from the current 110 billion minutes a month over the next five years, the report stated.