However, President Trump’s executive order has been canned by the Biden Administration.Įven with the slowdown in downloads due to India’s ban and both Facebook and Snapchat launching clones of TikTok, the app remains one of the fastest growing in the world. TikTok also faced having to sell its operations in the US to a holding company, which would have been controlled by Walmart and Oracle. India upheld the ban in January 2021, which has led to several other TikTok-clones taking over market share in the country. India banned the app again in June 2020, along with a spate of other Chinese-based apps, as tensions between China and India heightened. In 2019, India and Pakistan banned it for “morality issues”, with both bans being rescinded after a while.

Even though it only launched in 2017, TikTok was the seventh-most downloaded app of the 2010s, and looks to be a true competitor against Facebook’s grip on social networking in the West.Įven with this stellar growth, TikTok has faced several controversies. It was downloaded 693 million times in 2019 and 850 million times in 2020.

This added 80 million users, mostly in the US, which TikTok then imported to its own platform.įrom there, TikTok snowballed into the most popular app in 20.

While many Chinese apps have failed to succeed outside of China, most notably Tencent’s WeChat, TikTok managed to push itself into the overseas market through the acquisition of Musical.ly in November 2017 for $1 billion.

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