YouTube Fills Void Left by India's Ban of TikTok With New "Shorts"
YouTube, part of Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google, is responding to the rapid growth of the video-sharing app TikTok. On Monday, YouTube unveiled its "Shorts" app, allowing users to create, upload, and edit their own videos of 15 seconds or less. The app is only available on Android devices in India now, but a YouTube blog post said an iOS version and wider availability of the app are coming.
TikTok originally launched as Musical.ly. In 2018 it was acquired by Chinese company ByteDance, which merged it with lip-syncing app Douyin and renamed the product TikTok. That's when its use exploded. By early 2019, Sensor Tower, which tracks mobile-app sales, counted more than 1 billion total downloads, and by April of this year, TikTok had been downloaded more than 2 billion times.
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