At One Place

Which came first, Instagram or TikTok?

Which came first, Instagram or TikTok?
Instagram
2010 — 6 years before TikTok

Instagram came first, by 6 years. The app launched on iOS.

Side by side

Instagram TikTok
Year 2010 2016
Date 2010-10-06
Category technology technology
What happened The app launched on iOS. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.

Instagram

Instagram launched in October 2010 as an iPhone-only app and took 25,000 users on its first day. Facebook bought it in April 2012 for about $1 billion when it had thirteen employees and no revenue. It is four years younger than Twitter and six years older than TikTok.

TikTok

The app launched in China as Douyin in September 2016 and internationally as TikTok in 2017. What made it global was the 2018 acquisition and merger of Musical.ly, a lip-sync app that had launched in 2014 and already had a large Western user base — so part of TikTok is two years older than TikTok. Douyin and TikTok remain separate apps on separate infrastructure.

Common questions

Which came first, Instagram or TikTok?
Instagram, by 6 years — 2010 against 2016.
When did Instagram start?
2010. The app launched on iOS.
When did TikTok start?
2016. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)
  2. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked