The Most Popular Messenger Apps by Country

According to surveys in 94 countries, WhatsApp is the world leader and ranks first among messengers in 58 countries, 30% of the world and 63% of this dataset. These countries include: Argentina, Czech Republic, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and others.

Facebook Messenger ranked second with the highest popularity in 15 countries, including the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, the Philippines, Poland, Sweden and Thailand.

Telegram is the only messenger app (other than the two above) to rank first in three or more countries, showing high popularity in 11 countries, including Armenia, Egypt, Lithuania and Venezuela.

Viber has a strong presence in Europe, leading in Greece and Ukraine. And Line maintains its popularity in Asia, with the highest numbers in Japan and Taiwan.

Apps that lead in only one country are Discord (Slovenia), KakaoTalk (South Korea), Phoenix (Algeria), Zalo (Vietnam) and WeChat (China).

Top 5 Apps. Performance by Country
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber and Line are among the top five most popular messenger apps, representing 88 countries, or 45% of the world and 95% of this data set.
Below is a breakdown of each mobile messenger app's performance in the three countries with the highest popularity.
The metrics analyzed included the following:
Installation Penetration.
Percentage of devices in a given market with the app installed
Downloads.
Downloads of apps from the Google Android store over a given period of time
Unique Installations.
Unique installations of apps during a specified period of time
Daily active users.
Average number of unique daily active users
Monthly active users.
Average number of unique monthly active users

WhatsApp
WhatsApp dominates the Israeli mobile messenger app market with an installation penetration rate of nearly 90%. The highest DAU and MAU rates for this app are in Germany, but that makes sense, given the size of the population.

Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger has an average installation penetration of around 66%, with Canada topping the leaderboard with 68%. Poland has the highest DAU, but France is better at attracting new users and has the highest rate of unique installations.

Telegram
Telegram Penetration averages around 30% in the top three countries, with Russia leading with 36%. Russia also has the highest unique install rate at 5.6 million between January and March 2021. In terms of this app, Italy surpasses Spain, especially in terms of DAU and MAU.

Viber
The Viber app is very popular in Ukraine, with an installation penetration of 80%, followed by Greece with 77%. Although Russia has a much lower installation penetration than the other two countries in this group, it is the country with the largest number of new users and unique installations over this period of time.

Line
Line is becoming an increasingly popular messenger in Asia, as evidenced by its strong presence in both Thailand, Taiwan and Japan. Although Japan has the lowest installation penetration rate among these three countries, the rate of new user acquisition and retention of existing users is higher here than in Taiwan.