Owner of TikTok ByteDance, a highly popular video-sharing app with nearly 500 million regular users, has said it’s planning to design and develop smartphones.
The app, which is thought to have been downloaded over a billion times on app stores, lets people post videos of 15 seconds.
The app is making the move after obtaining patents and employees from device-maker Smartisan. As well as TikTok, ByteDance owns numerous popular AI-based video and news apps, such as Slack alternative Lark, video-chat app Flipchat, and news aggregator Toutiao.
TikTok, nevertheless, is its most popular presentation so far and has done exceptionally well with both Western and Asian audiences, so much as it has defeated Uber to become the world’s largest privately supported company, with a projected value of $75bn.
Chinese financial magazine Caijing says that the new phone is being developed for seven months.
ByteDance is not the first developer to take advantage of a popular app. In 2013, Chinese selfie-app-maker Meitu started making phones custom-made to consumers who are interested in taking photos of themselves.
Promoted by popular Chinese social media influencers, Meitu’s phones comprise dual pixel cameras with faster auto-focus as well as artificial intelligence to choose the most effective customized photo-editing filters for each user.
China, however, has become a very cheap market for smartphone manufacturers and yet another device is thought to be able to look different.
Ben Wood, technology analyst at CCS Insight, said: “It’s extremely difficult for any new entrants to break into the smartphone market profitably, particularly at a time when big brands such as Apple, Samsung and Huawei are carpet-bombing consumers with millions of pounds worth of marketing.”
“There are always niches that open up in the smartphone market but they tend to be ‘firework products’, starting with a big bang and quickly disappearing.”
Technology greats such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have also gone beyond their main businesses but with erratic success.