If you thought 15-second videos of mischievous teenagers will be a thing of the past with the demise of Vine, think again. Social app TikTok recorded its highest download count on the US App Store by the end of October 2018, appearing ahead of more mainstream applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat.
According to San Fransisco-based mobile app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, TikTok topped the other social media heavyweights for the first time in September 2018, before repeating the success the following month.
This achievement comes in the heels of this year’s merging of similar platform Musical.ly and TikTok by ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company that owns both titles in an effort to target a bigger global audience. ByteDance bought Musical.ly from a Shanghai startup in 2017 due to the latter’s popularity in the US market. The absorption, however, did not affect Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok which remains as a standalone app.
TikTok is a short-video sharing application similar to Vine where users can watch and quickly create videos using built-in templates and features such as music, stickers and animations. In the first quarter of 2018, the platform became the most downloaded non-game application in Apple’s App Store, reaching 45.8 million downloads.
The app is not without its fair share of controversy either. Recently Hong Kong legislators raised concerns that TikTok did not have sufficient safety settings in place to protect the privacy of its young users. An investigation by Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post found that children as young as 9 years old were on the platform although TikTok requires users to be 16 years old and above. In July 2018, Indonesia blocked the app for a week due to concerns of pornography and blasphemy.
TikTok also faces threat from IT conglomerate Tencent, which sees the former as a competition to its messaging and video sharing app WeChat. Amid complaints of WeChat blocking videos hosted on TikTok, ByteDance filed two lawsuits against Tencent citing purported anti-competitive conduct. Tencent retaliated the same day by filing a lawsuit against ByteDance for alleged defamation.
The cases are currently pending trial.
