TikTok’s Parent Company Launches Another Social Video App

The latest ByteDance product comes weeks after WeChat added its own Snapchat-like video-sharing feature

By Liang Chenyu

ByteDance — the tech company behind news aggregator Toutiao and short-video app TikTok, also known as Douyin in China — launched a Snapchat-like social app to the China market on Tuesday.

Douyin’s president, Zhang Nan, said during the launch event that the new app, dubbed Duoshan, will be closely linked with Douyin and its 250 million daily users. A press release describes some of Duoshan’s features: video posts that disappear after 72 hours, video messaging between users, an option to attach cash-filled red envelopes to videos to encourage viewing, a meme repository, a newsfeed of user-uploaded videos, and a red heart button that can be used to strike up a conversation when users can’t be bothered to think of words.

In December, Tencent’s ubiquitous social app, WeChat, announced that it was adding a Snapchat-like feature to its own platform: Its Time Capsule option allows users to share short videos to their social feeds that disappear after 24 hours.

Duoshan launched on Apple’s app store with a limited release and reached its quota of 10,000 downloads within hours. No download limit has been set for Android devices.

Editor: David Paulk.

(Header image: A man holds a cellphone displaying the greeting page of the Duoshan app, Shanghai, Jan. 15, 2019. Ding Yining/Sixth Tone)

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