The first one was another Chinese app that Alex Zhu and Louis Yang developed in 2014. Instead, it originated from two apps that eventually merged: Musical.ly and Douyin. And that’s just one of the reasons why you shouldn’t use it.Īlthough TikTok gained an instant and massive success, it did not kick off in its current format. As it turned out, there are numerous security and privacy concerns over TikTok and ByteDance. The US government, for example, launched an investigation into the app, while some countries like India have banned it. However, more success means more scrutiny, especially since the app is Chinese. The 16-year-old is the platform’s biggest star with 41.8 million followers. TikTok can be credited with launching a lot of “unknown” users into stardom, like Charli D’Amelio. It allows them to share short dance clips, lip-sync, comedy, and challenge videos with their followers. The app has a very tight demographic: mostly famous among teens and young people. That was after the parent company, ByteDance, merged Musical.ly and Douyin to create the popular social platform.īut despite all this success, many Internet users haven’t heard of TikTok.
In just a few years, it witnessed a meteoric rise that earned it more than two billion downloads worldwide. TikTok, a Chinese short-video application, has taken the world by storm.