TikTok of Bytedance was the lord of short videos. In India, it was banned along with 58-plus other Chinese origin apps in June 2020 at the height of India-China border tension. India was probably its biggest market. According to some reports, TikTok is trying to re-enter India under a new name — TickTok. It has filed for trademark for the new name.

In the US, TikTok was being forced to break up and there were bidders such as Microsoft and Oracle competing to acquire it.

ByteDance was not a pioneer in short videos. Douyin was launched as a clone of Musical.ly. Douyin is TikTok in China. ByteDance managed to buy Musical.ly and Twitter shut down Vine. Even Instagram’s short videos predated TikTok but never achieved the popularty of TikTok. There are TikTok clones such as Facebook’s Reels, InMobi’s Glance, Josh, Mx Taka Tak which are growing in popularity and subscribers. Before its closure. TikTok had a subscriber base of over 600 million downloads.