TikTok Has Just Had A New Competitor, A Fashion App Called Sloy

TikTok, the super successful platform for sharing short videos, has just had a new rival. The new site is the creation of Yandex, a software giant based in Russia, and it is called Sloy. The app has already come to the App Store and will make it to Android shortly.

In Russian, sloy means layer, and the platform uses just the formula that has made the popularity of TikTok, short videos that can be quickly uploaded. Yandex has been developing the app for some time, and back in June, it went into beta testing.

For now, Sloy’s main focus is style and fashion, but it will come as no surprise if it expands to other fields as well. One of the highlights of the app is that it can identify the clothing items users are wearing.

Sloy is available for iOS users in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia on the Apple App Store. Next year, Yandex will launch the app for Android users as well as offer it in the US and European markets.

Sloy bears a striking resemblance to Instagram. Users will have a tab for scanning and identifying pieces of clothing someone wears in a video, a tab for the profile, another one for recording videos, and a feed for posts of friends and recommended content. Whenever users open a video, the information of the items the app can recognize will appear, along with recommendations for other videos. So far, Sloy has been tested by several experts in the fashion industry.

Sloy is now in head-on competition with TikTok, a platform that has seen incredible success in the past few years. It has grown so much that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, had to admit that it was outperforming Instagram. According to Reuters, TikTok has over 500 million users each day.