TikTok’s Chinese Owner Has a Bunch of Other Popular Apps
Reading Time: 4 minutesGuess What Else TikTok’s Parent Company Owns, Seems relevant., TikTok parent ByteDance owns a bunch of other popular apps. Seems relevant!
For all the clamor around TikTok and its China-based parent corporation, ByteDance, one fact about them tends to get overlooked: that the Chinese company has other apps, some of which are also quite popular, including in the United States. TikTok is one of the most dominant social platforms in the world, a fact that’s made it the subject of a congressional grilling this week following the government’s threat to ban TikTok if its U.S. operations aren’t divested from ByteDance and sold to domestic owners. Still, the rest of the ByteDance portfolio is no joke, encompassing various games, photo- and video-editing tools, news aggregators, and even virtual reality software across continents. The tech behemoth, which has about seven subsidiary companies, was pumping out social apps long before it sprung TikTok upon the world—something that will still be true even if the United States does ban its golden goose.
If TikTok merits scrutiny, or at least a better understanding of how it works, then these apps do as well. In the U.S., the primary knock against TikTok is that ByteDance’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party—which owns a 1 percent stake in the company—imply that the massive troves of American user data collected by TikTok could end up in unfriendly hands. (TikTok supporters note, however, that U.S.-based social media platforms are much more invasive and reckless when it comes to data privacy and security.) Even if you buy that line of thinking, it’s hard not to notice that the hyperfocus on TikTok has led to inconsistent policy. For example, when India banned TikTok in 2020 in retaliation against Chinese military aggression, the subcontinent still allowed the use of some other ByteDance products, like the music-streaming app Resso. If the U.S. takes a similar tack, could other ByteDance apps be on the chopping block? And should you even worry about them? Here are the other ByteDance products that are also available in the States.
What: Behind TikTok and its China-exclusive equivalent Douyin, CapCut is ByteDance’s third-most-popular app worldwide, boasting an audience of 200 million monthly active users as of January. CapCut, first developed in China in 2018 and released for international consumption in 2020, offers a suite of advanced, easy-to-use video-editing tools like visual filters, audio add-ons, photo-mixing, and integration with other video apps such as—you guessed it—TikTok. Indeed, the app has taken off globally thanks in large part to in-app promotion on TikTok and Douyin. ‘There are a lot of other editing programs I’ve looked into for my TikToks, but almost all of them are super expensive or are harder to use,’ says Lucien Frey-Lotto, an 11-year-old CapCut enthusiast (and daughter of MediaDownloader editor-in-chief Hillary Frey). ‘I always end up going back to CapCut because it’s easy to use and has every kind of feature I need.’ The app is free but also offers paid subscriptions for its Pro features, which include exclusive perks like text templates.
Where to download: CapCut is available on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play for mobile and desktop use.
Data concerns? Per app-store disclosures, the app can use identifiers to track your activity across the web, and will collect other account data like your contact info and usage data. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
What: One of ByteDance’s newer stateside offerings, Hypic advertises itself as a ‘beauty maker‘ on the App Store, a way for you to touch up selfies or other photos of your face right on your device of choice. Features from the free app include skin-smoothing, face-reshaping and -sculpting, and visual filters for overall ambience. You can also use it on TikTok to add artificial intelligence–powered face filters to your short-form videos. Hypic isn’t as popular as other ByteDance apps, with middling download numbers on the Apple and Google stores, but constant TikTok promotion could change that.
Where to download: Hypic is available on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play for mobile and desktop use, and it’s even recommended for your iPad.
Data concerns? Per app-store disclosures, the app will utilize identifiers to track your activity all over the internet, but the stuff you make using Hypic will not be linked to your identity.
What: Developed by a ByteDance subsidiary company in 2019, Lark is an office-productivity and -collaboration program meant to optimize the various drudgeries of white-collar work: a Messenger app for chatting with colleagues, shared Docs for collaboration, a Calendar for hosting meetings and distributing memos, and more. The sell is that all these tools—which resemble those of the Google workplace suite—can easily function with one another. For example, you can reference a meeting invite without leaving your chat window, or you can make a video call directly from the Calendar. The free app has more than a million downloads on Google Play.
Where to download: On Google Play, you can download the Lark app for both desktop and mobile use, but the App Store so far allows only for smartphone or iPad download.
Data concerns? Per app-store disclosures, Lark can collect your location, contact info, search history, and usage data, all while linking these details to your identity.
What: Lotsa games around here! Through subsidiary Nuverse, ByteDance offers a pricey app called Inked for both Apple and Google, in which you play as a nameless samurai who embarks on a ‘puzzle-ridden quest‘ in a world visualized through ballpoint-pen illustrations. Inked is the only Nuverse product on the App Store, but Google Play has more Nuverse games: Marvel Snap, Land of Empires: Immortal, My Time at Portia, Warhammer 40,000: Lost Crusade, and Darkness & Divinity. Out of these, Marvel Snap is the highest-rated and most-downloaded.
Where to download: From Google Play, you can download all the aforementioned games to both mobile and desktop devices. Apple’s App Store, as previously mentioned, has Inked available only for mobile and desktop, at the hefty cost of $9.99. (It’s $3.99 on Google.)
Data concerns? Among these games, the paid apps (Inked and My Time at Portia) claim not to download or track user data. The free games do collect and share contact info and location records, however.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/tiktok-bytedance-capcut-hypic-ban-marvel-snap.html
Ref: slate
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