TikTok is one of the most popular social media today. With its app, you can record and upload short videos that can get popular all around the globe. It’s youth-oriented and some say it’s meaningless, but it delivers pure positive emotions.

TikTok Features

One may call it the video-oriented version of Instagram. In TikTok, you record your short videos, up to 15 seconds, and upload them for everyone to see. Add captions and hashtags to make them easier to find. Watch others share their joy and smile to see it! 

As the app is social, there are subscriptions and private messages. If you like someone’s video, you can add them to your feed, like and comment them, or chat privately.

Many users love it for its video editor that allows for recording videos with live filters, adding emoji and AR-based stickers, extra information, and so on. You can set up the timer, adjust speed, apply beautifiers, use filters, or process videos in other apps and then import to TikTok. Vice versa, videos published on TikTok can be saved and reposted to other services, like Facebook or Instagram.

Social elements are highly promoted on TikTok. For example, you can publish your reaction to someone else’s video, showing both the original and your face responding to it. There are always various challenges, flash mobs, popular hashtags to follow, and other news every day.

Registration is easy: you can just connect it to Google, Apple, or Facebook, and your account will be connected and easy to restore. The app requires access to your phone book; when allowed, it forms your feed and recommendations upon it. On the other hand, you subscribe to users manually, with no automatic contact list generation like in messengers.

TikTok Usability

The feature of TikTok is vertical videos it fosters. As you run the app, the entire screen is given to the video, no frames around. All the buttons upon it are here to react: like the video, save it to favorites, and so on. It makes the best use possible out of large screens. Gesture control is simple to master. Swipe up to scroll the feed. Swipe down to refresh. Swipe left to see the page the current video is from.

On the other hand, being established in China, TikTok causes many concerns about the privacy of the data it receives. It has been banned in the U.S. and Australian military forces, and briefly in India. It is also considered a dangerous place because most of its audience is young. Though profiles of users under 16 are not available in a public search, the youngest users still can be reached with vicious intentions.

Highs 

• Fresh and cool;
• Lots of tools to enhance your videos;
• Easy to share videos to other services;
• Can be used for entertainment, education, business.

Lows

• Some consider it lightminded and even amoral;
• Privacy issues reported.