TikTok facts for kids

TikTok (Douyin 抖音)

Screenshot A screenshot of the iOS version of the TikTok app, as seen in the United States.
Developer(s)	ByteDance
Initial release	September 2016 (2016-09). Released worldwide after merging with Musical.ly on 2 August 2018.
Stable release	15.5.0 / 31 March 2020
Operating system	iOS, Android
Size	308.3 MB (iOS) 55.21 MB (Android)
Available in	40 languages
List of languages Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian, Cebuano, Czech, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Korean, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
Type	Video sharing
License	Proprietary software with Terms of Use
Alexa rank	▼ 309 (Global, April 2020)

TikTok is a online video sharing social networking service. It lets people create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. They can post anything from life hacks to dances or even recipes. It is popular in Canada, Australia, the UK, the United States, and other parts of the world. It was first released under the name of musical.ly but was later bought out and renamed TikTok.

TikTok was the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018.

TikTok was created by ByteDance. It was released in September 2016.

Security concerns

United States

In July 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the government was considering banning TikTok.

India

Following the 2020 China–India skirmishes, the Government of India officially banned TikTok along with 58 other apps on 29 June 2020 citing concerns pertaining to national security, sovereignty and integrity, as well as data security, privacy and public order.