Do you want to launch an app that could acquire more than 1.56 billion monthly active users worldwide in less than ten years? If yes, then you should choose TikTok like app development because this video-sharing app has achieved immense success and popularity.
Instagram achieved this milestone in 12 years and YouTube achieved it in 13 years. But, TikTok set new standards by leaving them behind. Ever since its launch in 2016, TikTok has always grown higher and reached new milestones with every passing year. As of August 2024, the application has 4.92 billion downloads worldwide.
The incredible success of TikTok has shown the world how video-sharing apps can become an essential part of people’s lives. TikTok has shown that businesses can achieve success after utilizing addictive short-format videos, AI-powered recommendations, user-friendly interfaces, global accessibility, and targeted marketing campaigns for a young audience.
Therefore, this sensational video-sharing app has turned into a billion-dollar app concept for businesses and entrepreneurs. Apart from many apps in the market, you can stand out by making a video-sharing app like TikTok.
So, if you are a startup or entrepreneur who wants to launch an app like TikTok and achieve success in this highly promising market, then you are at the right place. In this comprehensive guide, we will tell you how to build an app like TikTok and achieve similar success. So, let’s get started by understanding:
Table of Contents
How Does TikTok Work?
TikTok is a popular video-sharing application that allows users to post short videos from 15 seconds to 10 minutes in length, offering users to add background music, and other accessories and edit the app how they like.
It also has an AI-powered algorithm that personalized content recommendations on the ‘For You’ page by analyzing user behavior, such as likes, comments, shares, and watch time. Analyzing this data helps them provide engaging and relevant content. This process creates a feedback loop that keeps users hooked while creating trends and viral challenges.
Features To Consider During TikTok Like App Development
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps because it has advanced and intuitive features that garnered attention from the audience. Let’s take a look at some features that you should include while making an app like TikTok.
User Panel
Several features should be included for users to provide them seamless user experience while using the application.
- Sign-In/Onboarding: This is essential for the application’s first page. You can ask the user for basic information, authorization details, password setup, and recovery options. Like TikTok, you can provide a ‘skip’ feature so that the user can enjoy the app without creating an account.
- Create & Edit Profile: This feature allows users to create and update their profiles. Allow your users to change their profile bio, contact details, profile picture, password, and other details at their convenience. This customization makes them feel valued.
- Explore/For You Page: You can allow users to watch short videos posted by other users. You can also allow users to scroll through recommended content and trending videos that are going viral. Every video should contain a hashtag, a caption, and a soundtrack that users can play in the background.
- Like, Comment, and Share: You should allow users to like, comment on, and share the content they watch. This will help you engage users and encourage them to spend more time on the application.
- Push Notifications: Push notifications are used to provide users with timely updates. You can notify users about the videos posted by the creators they follow on the app. Also, provide them with notifications related to the performance of their content.
- Video Recording/Editing/ Uploading: Include a video editor in your application that allows users to edit recordings or add higher-quality effects. These in-app editors are essential to speed up the process and complete the tasks faster with fewer steps. After editing, allow users to upload videos with relevant hashtags and captions.
- Live Streaming: TikTok users with more than 1K followers can live stream on the app. Allow live streaming in your application to help creators connect with their fans and spend more time on the app.
- Music Library: Include a large music and sound library in the application so that users can lip-sync and dance along to the songs that are becoming popular currently. Music can be added by using lyrics or recording it.
- Duet/Remix: This feature allows your users to display another person’s video alongside their own. With this feature, users can collaborate, increasing user engagement and collaboration on the app.
- AI-based Recommendations: Allow users to browse or explore videos and suggest videos based on the type of content they frequently watch. This recommendation feature will encourage them to spend more time on the application.
Admin Panel
The admin panel includes multiple functions to increase user engagement. You can launch your app with basic features that are listed below but more advanced and unique features can help your application gain more users and a competitive edge. Let’s take a look at the features:
- User Management: Admins should have access to view, edit, and manage user profiles or activate, deactivate, and ban user accounts.
- Content Moderation: Admins should be able to approve, reject, or flag uploaded videos and they should manage hashtags and challenges happening on the app.
- Analytics Dashboard: This feature allows admins to track user engagement, video views, and likes. Apart from that, they can monitor real-time app performance, and view revenue reports from ads and subscriptions.
- Privacy & Security Controls: This feature helps manage user permission and privacy settings. Also, it allows to monitoring of suspicious activities and ensures data protection.
- Performance Monitoring: It allows admins to monitor server uptime and app performance metrics and also allows tracking usage spikes to optimize app infrastructure.
Advantages of TikTok Like App Development
After understanding the features, you need to take a look at the advantages of building an app like TikTok. Video-sharing apps have gained popularity in recent times by revolutionizing how we create, consume, and engage with content. Businesses should build an app like TikTok because they can get a lot of benefits such as:
1. Reach A Massive Audience
Video content is engaging for the audience and short-form videos are more addictive because they contain appealing and engaging content. Applications like TikTok use this psychology and offer entertaining, short, and engaging content that users can quickly consume. It allows businesses to reach a massive number of audience, daily app usage, and higher retention rates. With these apps, businesses get an active audience base.
2. Potential of Viral Content
When you launch an app like TikTok, it comes with an opportunity to make your content viral among people. Businesses leverage this opportunity by launching unique and engaging challenges or trends. These challenges attract more users to the application, resulting in the promotion of the app and making it a hub for creative people.
3. Data-Driven Insights For Long-Term Success
Video-sharing apps collect and read valuable data about user behavior, preferences, and trends. This data helps businesses to refine their strategies, improve user experience, and create more personalized content. These data-driven insights enable targeted advertising and help in making ad campaigns more effective for other brands. It helps in making the application future-ready by understanding the changing needs of the users.
4. Begin Brand Awareness And Marketing
Businesses get a massive advantage after launching a video-sharing app. They can use the platform to promote their own company products and services while allowing advertisers to do the same. Partnership with influencers and advertising natively helps them promote the brand and spread awareness.
5. Opportunities To Earn More Money
With a mobile app, businesses can open up several monetization opportunities. They can generate revenue through in-app purchases by allowing brands to display targeted ads. Businesses can sell filters, effects, or digital currencies and offer premium features or ad-free experiences for a minimal amount. It helps them earn more money by diversifying their revenue streams.
TikTok Like App Development: Step-by-Step Process
So now that you know why you should create an app like TikTok, it’s time for you to know the whole process. This step-by-step process is important for you to partner with a video-sharing social media app development company and start your app development journey.
Let’s understand the process:
Step 1: Conduct Proper Market Research
You should start the process by understanding your audience. This step will help you get a clear understanding of the market dynamics, competitors, marketing strategies, and trends. To understand your audience, you need to:
Understand the age, location, and type of device of your target audience. This will help you understand how often they visit your content and what they prefer. You also need to identify a couple of trends that you can apply to your future application.
Step 2: Choose A Monetization Model
After deciding on your potential users, you need to decide on your app’s business model to earn money. To make the best app like TikTok, you can choose the best monetization models. Some famous models are In-app purchases, advertising, fundraising, cost per click, and cost per action.
Step 3: Know Your Audience
You need to understand your audience before building your application. Although TikTok is popular globally, it’s quite hard to reach this audience at the initial stage of your application. So, you can also launch your application for a specific audience, like when it was initially launched in China.
Step 4: Focus On Designing The App
The app’s interface is the first thing that users see and it should be attractive. You need to create a straightforward UI/UX that offers no distractions for the audience. Make it easy for users to sign up, fill out the necessary data, and jump in.
Step 5: Hire A Professional Team
It’s impossible to start a project without a team that includes skilled professionals. You can hire experts who are well-versed in market strategies and great executors of the best design concepts. The team should include a frontend developer, a backend developer, a UI/UX designer, and a QA engineer. If you are hiring freelancers then you should know about the cost of hiring an app developer. You can also partner with a social media app development company. This partnership will provide you with everything that you need to complete the development of your application like TikTok.
Step 6: Build An MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
An MVP is the basic version of a mobile app that allows entrepreneurs to test their ideas, gather feedback, and determine whether their project aligns with the current market needs. MVP development cost is also lower than a full-fledged app so that’s another advantage of building an MVP.
Choosing an MVP eliminates the need to dedicate the entire budget to a product that might never see the market and be unknown. With a minimum viable product, you will be able to test your idea at a lower cost and with fewer risks.
Step 7: Start Developing The Application
After making the final decision between a full-fledged app and an MVP, you need to start the development of the application. The software development team will assist you in building an app like TikTok. Beginning with the design, they provide an outline for the requirements and timeframes.
Then, comes the part of selecting a tech stack to build the application. You need to select a powerful tech stack to build a future-ready and advanced application. The typical technological toolchain contains React Native, Kotlin, Node.js, Swift (iOS), Objective-C (iOS), Jira, MongoD, MySQL, etc. You can also choose Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services to web host devices. Remember that they should help you in the long run.
Step 8: Release The App & Gather Feedback
After the development of your application, conduct a thorough testing and quality assurance phase to remove all the bugs. Launch the app quickly to stay ahead of time so that your target audience should be aware of it at the right time. You can adopt some common or advanced advertising approaches to promote your app and reach an audience.
After the launch, you are good to get user feedback. Doing this will help you understand the needs of users more accurately so that you can make changes and satisfy their changing needs.
Understanding TikTok Business Model: How Does TikTok Make Money?
TikTok has provided individuals with an opportunity to showcase their talents, unleash creativity, and promote content. it has become famous for short, entertaining videos that keep users engaged with endless scrolling. TikTok has not revealed its revenue model but using the app gives you an idea about how TikTok generates income. This video-sharing app makes money by combining several revenue models:
1. Advertising-Based Model
TikTok makes money through advertising, selling ad space to businesses and marketplaces to promote the products. According to reports, TikTok earned $13.2 billion from advertising. It offers different ad formats including brand takeovers, in-feed ads, top-view ads, branded hashtags, and branded effects.
2. Digital Goods Model
TikTok also sells digital products which are TikTok coins. Users buy them with real money and when they do this, they can make gift purchases for content creators as a token of appreciation.
3. Commission Based Model
When a user buys TikTok coins and virtually donates them to a content creator as a token of appreciation, the content creator has the option to withdraw all tips handed to them. After the withdrawal, they can get real money but TikTok gets a 50% share of every dollar withdrawn. They take some money as a part of the commission which makes this commission-based model popular and effective.
How Much Does It Cost To Build An App Like TikTok?
TikTok like app development costs can range up to $20,000 to $150,000+, varying on the complexity of the application. However, you should know that some factors affect the cost of developing a TikTok like app. These factors are:
- App Platforms
- Features & Functionality
- Design Requirements
- Development Team
- Tech Stack
These factors should be in mind while creating an app like TikTok. It takes nearly 6 months to build a simple app but an advanced app takes more time because it includes top-tier features. You can partner with an experienced social media app development company to build a next-level application or going through a social media app development guide can also help you understand the cost.
Conclusion
This blog must have helped you understand crucial things related to TikTok like app development so that you can start building your application. We know that the video-sharing industry is becoming highly competitive and launching an advanced & robust product is important to resonate with users and generate a loyal user base.
Businesses need to partner with a talented social media app development company to build a video-sharing app that can replicate the success of TikTok and get a place in people’s hearts. At RipenApps, we have a development team of skilled professionals who understand the specific needs of businesses and deliver a great product. We are obsessed with building applications that can achieve success.
FAQs
Q1: How Much Would it Cost to Build an App Like TikTok?
$35,000 to $300,000 is the cost of building an app like TikTok. However, the cost can vary depending on various factors such as app complexity, platform, design, development team, and tech stack.
Q2: How to Build an App Similar to TikTok?
You can build an app similar to TikTok by following some crucial steps which are market research, choosing a monetization model, understanding your audience, designing, hiring a team, building an MVP, developing, and launching & gathering feedback.
Q3: Which Technology is Used in TikTok?
TikTok is built with the use of technologies like Swift, Kotlin, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Node.js, SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Google Cloud Messaging, and Apple Push Notifications. These technologies have been used while building and creating the application.
Q4: What Should be the Key Features of an App Like TikTok?
When building a social media app like TikTok, it’s important to focus on features. The key features of developing an advanced app like TikTok are sign-in, video editing, filters, music integration, video uploading, personalized recommendations, etc.