TikTok follows Instagram and introduces TikTok Photos. Despite a lot of effort from TikTok, Instagram is still the most downloaded app in the world. Bad for TikTok, because it is partly because Instagram introduced its Reels: an exact copy of TikTok’s short videos. Now it’s taking revenge with TikTok Photos.
It’s not just Instagram that copies from other social media. Maybe you remember that during corona times the Clubhouse app suddenly became very popular, with which you could do a kind of live podcasts? Almost every social medium came with this at the time. And LinkedIn even had Stories, just to ride on the success of Snapchat, which actually became an even bigger success on Instagram. Copying is rampant in the world of social media, and with Instagram launching its own Twitter response Threads as a separate app, TikTok seems to want to imitate that design as well.
TikTok Photos
TikTok Photos is not what you probably think: it is not in the TikTok app itself but would become a separate app. A strange choice, considering one of the things that kept Instagram so popular all these years was that everything happens in one app. The Stories stolen from Snapchat, for example. TikTok seems to want to take a different approach and is doing a ‘Threads’: it will be a standalone app that will clearly have to compete directly with Instagram.
The news does not come from TikTok, but from a new app version of TikTok that refers to TikTok Photos, saw TheSpAndroid. However, it does not say that TikTok Photos is part of TikTok, but it does say that you can open things in TikTok Photos and that you can share posts on TikTok Photos. It is now clearly being tested and that does not mean that it will actually happen, but TikTok is working on it. We can’t really blame the company, although we are curious what TikTok Photos would entail. Will it really be a copy of Instagram’s regular grid posts, or will the Chinese company opt for something more innovative?
Instagram competitor
TikTok may have another success on its hands, although we think the app must offer something special that Instagram does not have with its grid posts. At the same time, we wonder whether it should be a separate app? It also sounds very logical to put it under a separate column within TikTok. Perhaps TikTok thinks that it will quickly be snowed under by the high entertainment value of all its small videos, and that is to be expected. We will see. It is also possible that we will not see this app launched at all in the near future.
