Melolo took 75.3 million downloads in the first half of 2026 — fourth in the world in this category, ahead of DramaBox. It is also not distributed to the United States on either official store, which we confirmed on 3 September 2026. The app is alive and updated; it simply is not sold to you. If an English-language list recommended it, that list checked the download data and not the store.
The short version. Melolo took 75.3 million downloads in the first half of 2026, fourth in the world in its category and ahead of DramaBox. It is also not distributed to the United States on either official store. If you have read an English-language "best short drama apps" list that recommended it, that list did not check whether you could install it.
We check store listings by hand rather than trusting aggregators, and on 3 September 2026 the Melolo check failed in a way that turned out to be the story.
Requesting the Google Play listing for the package com.worldance.drama under the United States storefront returns nothing. Not an error page, not a "this app is unavailable in your country" notice — an empty response, identical to what a deliberately invented package name returns. We repeated the check across separate sessions to rule out a transient failure. Querying Apple's public lookup endpoint for the same bundle identifier against the US App Store returns a result count of zero.
The package identifier is correct. Requesting the same listing under a different country's storefront returns a full, live page: last updated 14 August 2026, actively maintained, millions of reviews. The app exists, it is thriving, and it is simply not sold to you.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| United States availability | Not available on Google Play or the App Store |
| Package | com.worldance.drama |
| Publisher | POLIGON PTE. LTD., Singapore |
| Rating | 4.7 on the Indonesian storefront, 4.9 on the Philippine one |
| Reviews | 3.1M in the header, about 3.04 million in the Ratings and reviews block |
| Downloads | 100M+ band |
| Content rating | Rated for 12+ (Sexual Innuendo) |
| Monetisation declared | In-app purchases only — no "Contains ads" label |
| Category | Entertainment — #1 top free entertainment in Indonesia, #4 in the Philippines |
| Listing updated | 14 August 2026 (Indonesia), 8 August 2026 (Philippines) |
Two notes on those numbers. First, they describe the markets where Melolo actually operates; there is no US figure to quote because there is no US audience, and we would rather say that than convert a foreign rating into an implied domestic one. Second, the rating itself is storefront-dependent: 4.7 in Indonesia, 4.9 in the Philippines, read within minutes of each other. Anyone who prints "Melolo: 4.8" as a single global figure has averaged two different countries and told you about neither.
The availability gap matters because of how large the app is.
Half-year download tracking published in August 2026 by Mintegral, using Insightrackr data, ranked the top five short drama apps by installs across the first half of the year. Melolo came fourth — ahead of DramaBox, which is one of the two highest-earning apps in the entire category.
| Rank | App | H1 2026 downloads | Available in the US? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FreeReels | 195.8M | Yes |
| 2 | NetShort | 98.9M | Yes |
| 3 | ReelShort | 94.1M | Yes |
| 4 | Melolo | 75.3M | No |
| 5 | DramaBox | 64.3M | Yes |
Sensor Tower's State of Short Drama Apps 2026, published in June, describes the same app qualitatively rather than numerically: growth concentrated in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, with an advertising-supported user base in Indonesia in particular. That fits the availability picture. Melolo is a Southeast Asian success story that never needed a US listing to reach the global top four.
Neither store publishes a reason for a given app's regional availability, and the developer has not stated one, so we are not going to invent an explanation. What we can do is set out the ordinary reasons apps are limited to selected markets, so you can judge how alarming this is. In our view: not very.
Any of these is sufficient on its own, and none of them implies anything is wrong with the app. Regional availability is a business decision, not a verdict.
Search for Melolo and you will find APK mirror sites offering the installer directly. We are going to be direct about why that is a bad trade.
A sideloaded APK from a mirror site is a file of unknown provenance. It bypasses Google Play Protect's scanning, it does not receive automatic updates, and you have no way to verify that the build you downloaded matches the one the developer published. That last point is the important one: repackaged apps with injected advertising or credential-harvesting code are a well-established category of mobile malware, and drama apps with large international audiences are an obvious target.
The payment side compounds it. Anything you buy inside a sideloaded app runs outside Google's billing, which means no store refund route, no store cancellation, and no subscription entry in your Play subscriptions list. We spend a lot of time in this category explaining that store-level cancellation is the only cancellation that counts — see what the ReelShort Android and iPhone rating gap actually measures for what happens when that goes wrong even inside the official stores.
Weigh that against what you are buying: an app whose distinguishing feature is a lighter ad load than its competitors. That is a real benefit, and it is nowhere near enough to justify the exposure.
It is worth recording what the app is praised for, because it identifies a gap that US-available apps could fill.
The recurring theme in reviews on the storefront we could read is ad discipline. One reviewer, writing on 26 July 2026, described the app as having "a little ads but its ok compared to other same app that has so much add." Another, on 29 July 2026, put it in terms of outcome: when you know how to manage the ads you can really finish the series, adding that other apps in this category run ads that are long and annoying while these are short and dismissable. A third, on 8 August 2026, was blunt in the other direction, rating the writing poorly and saying the ads made it less enjoyable still. Both are user reports rather than measurements, and both are consistent with an app that funds itself through advertising but has not pushed the load to the limit.
The same review pages contain requests for features rather than refunds — a choice between dubbed and original audio, better subtitle selection — which is what a reasonably contented user base asks for. The developer's public replies commit to adjusting ad frequency, which tells you the ad load is a live setting here as it is everywhere else in this category.
If ad frequency rather than price is your actual objection to this category, the closest US-available equivalent is FreeReels, which is the most downloaded app in the world in this category and runs the same attention-for-episodes trade. We would add one caveat carried over from that review: FreeReels' own 2026 reviewers document its free terms being repriced during the year, so test the current ad load rather than trusting a reputation.
The alternative worth considering is counter-intuitive. If interruption is the problem, a weekly subscription on a coin-based app removes advertising entirely, and per hour watched it can cost less than the time you would spend farming free currency. We worked through that arithmetic in what to do when short drama apps get too expensive.
If you go looking for Melolo you will run into MeloShort, and they are not the same app. Confusing them is easy and the consequences are real, because one is available to you and the other is not.
| Melolo | MeloShort | |
|---|---|---|
| Package | com.worldance.drama | com.drama.happy.look |
| Publisher | POLIGON PTE. LTD., Singapore | HALOFUN PTE. LTD., Singapore |
| Available in the US | No | Yes |
| Rating | 4.7 (Indonesia) / 4.9 (Philippines) | 4.5 (US) |
| Reviews | About 3.04 million | About 96,000 |
| Downloads | 100M+ | 10M+ |
| Monetisation declared | In-app purchases | Contains ads |
Different package identifiers, different companies, different registered addresses, and a thirty-fold difference in review volume. The only thing they share is a similar name. MeloShort appears in Google's Similar apps carousel on several US listings, which is presumably where the confusion starts — if a recommendation list tells you Melolo is available in the United States, it has probably found MeloShort and not noticed.
There is a broader point here, and it applies to us as much as to anyone else.
Melolo appears in English-language recommendation lists. It is fourth in the world by downloads, which makes it an obvious candidate for one. But an app you cannot install is not a recommendation — it is a fact about someone else's market presented as advice.
The reason this happens is that most rankings are assembled from analyst summaries and other rankings rather than from store listings. Download the data and Melolo is unambiguously a top-five app. Open the store and it does not exist for you. Only the second check catches that, and it is the check that gets skipped, in the same way that the widely repeated per-app download figures in this category are attributed to the wrong analyst — something we ran into ourselves and traced back to its real source in where short drama download numbers come from.
Our own ranking covers apps you can install from your own store. It is at the 2026 ranking of 14 short drama apps, with pricing side by side in the comparison table, and the method behind the scores on how we test. Melolo is not in it, and now you know exactly why.
No. As of 3 September 2026 the Melolo listing does not open on the United States Google Play storefront, and a lookup against the US App Store for its bundle identifier returns no result. The app is live and actively updated — we reached the listing under the Indonesian and Philippine storefronts, where it was last updated on 14 and 8 August 2026 respectively — but it is not distributed to US users through either official store.
A short drama app published by POLIGON PTE. LTD., a Singapore company. It carries a large catalogue of vertical short dramas and has grown fastest in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Notably, its Google Play listing declares in-app purchases but carries no "Contains ads" label — yet reviewers describe advertising throughout, and the developer's own reply to a review in August 2026 refers to reinvesting revenue from watching ads. Take the store label as incomplete rather than as evidence the app is ad-free.
Fourth in the world by downloads. Half-year tracking published in August 2026 put Melolo at 75.3 million downloads across the first half of 2026, behind FreeReels at 195.8 million, NetShort at 98.9 million and ReelShort at 94.1 million, and ahead of DramaBox at 64.3 million. On the storefront where we could reach the listing it showed a 100 million-plus download band and about 3.04 million reviews.
It depends on the storefront, which is itself the point. Read on 3 September 2026, the Indonesian listing showed 4.7 and the Philippine listing 4.9, both from about 3.04 million reviews. There is no US figure at all, because there is no US audience. Anyone quoting a single global Melolo rating has averaged countries that disagree.
The stores do not publish reasons for regional availability, and neither does the developer, so we are not going to guess at one. Apps are commonly limited to selected countries for licensing, rights, tax, moderation or simple business reasons. What we can state is the observable fact: it does not open under the US storefront on either store.
You can, and we recommend against it. A sideloaded APK bypasses Google Play Protect scanning, receives no automatic updates, and any payment inside it runs outside Google's billing — which means no store refund route and no store cancellation. For an app whose main appeal is a light ad load, that is a lot of risk to accept for a marginal gain.
Its reputation is built on ad load rather than on catalogue or production, which is odd for an app whose store listing carries no advertising label at all. Reviewers on the storefront we could read describe a lighter interruption rate than competing apps, and one common piece of praise is that the ad pattern is manageable enough to finish a series without paying. The trade-off is that reviewers also ask for shorter series, which suggests episode counts run long.
The Google Play listing names POLIGON PTE. LTD. of Singapore as the publisher and makes no claim of any relationship with ByteDance or any other parent company. We have seen that connection asserted elsewhere and we could not verify it from any primary source, so we are not repeating it as fact.
The closest match on the free-and-ad-funded axis is FreeReels, which is available in the US, was the most downloaded short drama app globally in 2026, and runs the same trade of attention for episodes. If ad load rather than price is your actual complaint, a weekly subscription on a coin-based app removes ads entirely and may work out cheaper per hour than farming free currency.
We have no information either way, and neither the developer nor either store has announced anything we could find. Regional availability in this category changes without notice in both directions. If it appears on the US storefront we will update our ranking; until then we are not going to recommend an app that US readers cannot legitimately install.