Facebook does something no other non-Google app has ever done on Android

Facebook's popularity as the world's largest social networking service should no longer come as a surprise to anyone the least bit familiar with this crowded and incredibly competitive market, but if you perhaps thought all the user privacy invasions and security breaches of the past couple of years would have a major negative impact on the platform's key metrics, it looks like you were dead wrong.

After reporting an 8 percent year-over-year increase in both daily and monthly active users for 2019's second quarter, to a grand total of no less than 1.59 billion and 2.41 billion people respectively, Mark Zuckerberg's social network has recently managed to hit a major milestone on Android. As noticed by Android Police, the main Facebook app has 5 billion+ installs to its name in Google Play, thus joining a select group of only seven other apps and services.

The magnificent seven includes the actual Google Play Services package, as well as YouTube, Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail, Google Text-to-Speech, and Chrome. As you can notice, these products have one very important thing in common, being developed by the same company that just so happens to be the architect of the Android OS itself. It's also worth pointing out that all these apps are preloaded on Android devices by default, so their install counts are in fact equal to the number of phones and tablets sold worldwide.

Of course, Facebook has been enjoying some similar boosts of its own, but a large part of that 5 billion total comes from individual people who've chosen to manually download the app from Google's Play Store. Besides, one of the companies that used to pre-install Facebook on many Android phones around the world can no longer do that.

In case you're wondering, Facebook crossed the 1 billion Google Play install mark more than five years ago, followed by Google+ and WhatsApp. For obvious reasons, Big G's defunct social network is not expected to join the 5 billion club, but WhatsApp has a very good chance to follow the suit of its parent company's core social media app in the near future.