How to develop a mobile app like Tik Tok : business model, cost and features

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11 Min Read

In this technology driven world, there is an app for everything. An app to deliver food, app to order groceries, top snapchat clone, app to avail any services and so much more. The list is endless. A recent innovation is Tik Tok. The app has become an excellent source for entertainment and kept millions of audience glued to it. The moment you open any social media platform, you are sure to find numerous tik tok videos popping up on your screen. The success of Tik Tok made many entrepreneurs and startups develop a mobile app like that of Tik Tok.

What is Tik Tok?

Tik Tok is a video sharing and broadcasting platform that offers users to record short video clips ranging from 15sec to 60sec and share it with their followers. The main selling point of this app is not its ability to share short video clips but it allows the users to edit the video clip by adding filters or their favourite music. This is Alex Zhu’s idea for the creation of TikTok inspired by the teenagers listening to music on different apps, taking selfies and recording short videos and sharing them with friends. From its launch in 2016, the app has seen tremendous success by becoming the most non-gaming downloaded app with more than two billion downloads. Even with some hiccups in India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the application continues to remain popular.

The Tik Tok app enables people to lip-sync to popular songs and dialogues. The users create and upload their lip-sync videos along with interacting with other users and their content. The app’s programming helps users to broadcast live apart from enabling them to take short videos. These videos can be edited by using filters and special effects from the app. The app also enables the users to watch videos that are shared by others on the app. The app allows the users to select relevant content that they would like to see. Tik Tok has enabled many users to display their talent. Apart from this, the app enables users to add their favourite music and content created by them. The app offers a simple and realistic editing tool that allows users to trim, merge, cut and duplicate their video clips. This is the first one of its kind and users are loving every part of the app.

How to create an App like TikTok?

There are many look-alike apps for every popular Visit here for top snapchat clones and much more. Now that you have made up your mind to create the app, let us dig deep on how to create one. There are a lot of aspects one needs to focus on while creating a music app. The music apps can be classified into two categories- Music streaming app and social music video app. Be clear in choosing your category. Both the categories require unique functionalities and features.  One needs to have in-depth knowledge of the tik tok programming language. This would make it easy for the users to develop a high performance app. Let us focus on some of the features of the app.

Good User Interface

For any app to be successful, it needs to be simple for the user to use it. The developers should aim at making the app extremely fun and hassle free for the users. The Tik Tok app starts by directly showing feed to the users. In this way, the app ensures that the user’s first few minutes on the app are amazing.

Hearts

The app enables the user to like the content of other creators, without having to follow them. The creator’s profile tracks all the hearts they received. In this way, he can deliver his next content based on the users tastes.

Hashtags

Over the years, hashtags have become more like the identity of people. People use it to gain popularity. Tik tok allows its users to use these hashtags and gain popularity overtime.

Live-Ops

This  feature is very much necessary to make your app a huge success. It works as an enhancement to overall game experience. It works to keep the mobile applications fresh and full of activity.  The app has global challenges and offers new challenges to the creators every week. In this way, the app ensures that its content stays relevant and fresh.

Social Feature

The app has an exciting social feature called duet. The creator can upload his lip-sync video and another creator can scan for popular content and try putting their own content along with that. This gives a feeling of closeness to their much- loved stars. The scope of creativity is also immense. The app also asks its users to integrate their other social media profiles. They can even post their content on other platforms and become popular.

Variety in Music

Tik tok offers a variety of music to its users. It also allows its users to use their original sound while creating their video. This makes them showcase their talent to the viewers.

Earn Money

The app allows its users to make money by creating funny content and posting it on the platform. By posting their content, users can widen their audience base and increase their followers.

Android, iOS

The app is both android and iOS friendly. This means that the app can be enjoyed by a wide range of audience without any difficulty.

Features to focus on

If you want to create an app like tik tok, you should focus on the features and functionalities that aren’t offered by the app. These extra features would attract the audience to your app.

Real- time views

Focus on making an app that will give real- time views of the user’s content. This feature will enable the user to analyze his live viewers and broadcasters in a graphical manner. This helps the user in delivering better content.

Video Streaming

Video streaming is the main reason for the success of Tik Tok. So, you shouldn’t miss on implementing every detail of it. You should focus that the app should be streaming from an external server and shouldn’t put much load on the mobile. Post usage, the broadcasting stream should automatically be deleted from the server- side. For this, focus on creating cloud servers. Also, the server should be able to handle more requests.

Geolocation

This feature enables users to find broadcasters as per their region. There will be a map which shows all the broadcasters and their location. The app marks and ranges around the user’s current location to show live broadcasters of that region.

Push Notifications

Notifications help the user to stay up to date. They are crucial for the working of the app. Push notifications keep the users engaged with the app and notify them of the current happenings. They will not miss out when their favourite broadcaster is live. The app can also work on a scheduling feature. This will help broadcasters to schedule their lives and for the users to keep track of them.

Development team

While working on app development, you need a great team to back you up through the entire process. Your team will be the backbone for the success of your app. You need to have a strong project manager, UX designer, Database experts, android and iOS developers, back-  end developer, QA experts and delivery manager on your team. After getting your team together, you can focus on the costs that will go into the making of the app. Read more info here for best tiktok clone services.

Development Cost

Factors that are helpful in determining the cost of a tik tok like app are the number of platforms the app is functional, design complexity, region where it is being developed, resources used, time invested in creating the app. If you add more features, then the costs will go high.

How to earn money from your app?

With so much money going in for the creation of your app, you must be wondering how to earn it back. Here are the tips to monetize your app: you can add the feature of in- app purchases, organise fundraisers to get connected with investors for your app, give your app for advertisements or you can even sell it once it becomes popular and attracts potential buyers.

Building an app like Tik Tok is a great way to earn profits. But the task will get very tiresome if you won’t choose the right developers team. Do your bit research and invest wisely.

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