TikTok different from Douyin
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese counterpart is Douyin (Chinese: 抖音; pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a short-form video hosting service owned by ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.Since their launches, TikTok and Douyin have gained global popularity. In October 2020, TikTok surpassed 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide. Morning Consult named TikTok the third-fastest growing brand of 2020, after Zoom and Peacock. Cloudflare ranked TikTok the most popular website of 2021, surpassing Google.TikTok vs. Douyin
Douyin was released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok is an entirely separate, internationalized version of Douyin, and was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; it merged with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.
TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. The two products are similar, but their features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them, along with other features such as buying, booking hotels, and making geo-tagged reviews.Musical.ly merger
On 9 November 2017, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, spent nearly $1 billion to purchase musical.ly, a startup headquartered in Shanghai with an overseas office in Santa Monica, California, U.S. Musical.ly was a social media video platform that allowed users to create short lip-sync and comedy videos, initially released in August 2014. TikTok merged with musical.ly on 2 August 2018 with existing accounts and data consolidated into one app, keeping the title TikTok. This ended musical.ly and made TikTok a worldwide app, excluding China, since China already had Douyin.Teenage mode
China heavily regulates how Douyin is used by minors in the country, especially after 2018. Under government pressure, ByteDance introduced parental controls and a "teenage mode" that shows only whitelisted content, such as knowledge sharing, and bans pranks, superstition, dance clubs, and pro-LGBT content. A mandatory screen time limit was put in place for users under the age of 14 and a requirement to link accounts to a real identity to prevent minors from lying about their age or using an adult's account. The differences between Douyin and TikTok have led some US politicians and commentators to accuse the company or the Chinese government of malicious intent. In March 2023, TikTok announced default screen time limits for users under the age of 18. Those under the age of 13 would need a passcode from their parents to extend their time.