ByteDance, The Company Behind TikTok, Is Planning To Launch Its Own Smartphone

ByteDance, the company behind the widely popular platform for sharing short videos TikTok is reportedly preparing to make its own smartphone. This news broke out after its acquisition of patents from Smartisan, a China-based phone maker.

According to the Financial Times, two credible sources who have insight into this matter have confirmed the rumor. ByteDance has recently launched its own messaging app named Feiliao and is developing its own music streaming service. With Feiliao, users can enter chat groups for all kinds of topics, including fan theories to scientific experiments. While with the paid music service, the company has officially joined a head-on competition with Spotify and Apple Music.

With this growing portfolio of mobile apps, the company is hoping it can make smartphones pre-installed with them.

The new project is led by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder after the company obtained lots of patents from Smartisan, a Chinese phone manufacturer. The recruiting process is happening as we speak. One of the sources of Financial Times said that Mr. Zhang had long been dreaming of a smartphone with ByteDance apps out of the box.

However, there are analysts who thought that the project of a phone with the company’s apps would not succeed in reality. According to Jia Mo, a Canalys’s analyst based in Shanghai, the mass market had no place for such a product. Facebook had a similar plan, and it collaborated with Samsung and HTC to launch a smartphone with pre-loaded apps based on the Facebook Home platform. Another firm with the same idea is Amazon. It introduced the Amazon Fire phone, but it did not exactly do well on the market.

For the time being, we do not know if ByteDamce will limit the market for its upcoming phone to China. However, as Xiaomi is so successful in India, the company might consider this emerging market too.