The popular Chinese short-video platform TikTok has opened an office in Silicon Valley and begun to poach Facebook employees, CNBC reported Tuesday citing multiple people.
TikTok recently moved into an office space in Mountain View, California, which was previously occupied by Facebook’s WhatsApp, the report said.
TikTok was released in 2017by China-based startup ByteDance, which makes a Chinese version of the app called Douyin. TikTok lets users watch and create short videos that are usually set to songs. Across its suite of apps and around the globe, ByteDance now claims 700 million daily active users.
The new location gives TikTok a presence just miles from the Menlo Park headquarters of Facebook, elevating the rivalry between the two companies from a battle for young users to a competition for talent.
According to Sensortower, the non-game app with most downloads worldwide for September 2019 is WhatsApp with close to 68 million installs.
TikTok ranked second with in September with more than 60 million installs. India was the country with the largest number of TikTok installs with more than 44 percent of total downloads and the United States had 8 percent of total downloads of TikTok.
Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram were ranked in the top five most installed non-game apps worldwide in the month of September.
A new video editing app named Jianying Vlog from the maker of TikTok ByteDance launched in May 2019 also ranked in the top 10 downloaded apps for App store Downloads and this needs to be appreciated.