How To Create An App Like TikTok: Features, Estimation, Tech Stack

TikTok, a leading social networking service of making & sharing short-mobile videos has been getting immense limelight in youngsters these days. People who use to watch online videos are now making their presence in the world of the internet using this app. This app offered a creative platform for many who wanted to create their content and make use of their talent.

TikTok has not only influenced the content creators but it has also made a huge impact on the app developers dubai. There are large numbers of app developers who are now trying to understand the technicality of this app and estimate the total cost of developing it. So, let’s take a glimpse on the process of creating an app like TikTok, its features, and cost estimation.

What is this app all about?

TikTok offered a great platform for its users to create & upload their video content and show it to the online world. Apart from providing the feature to directly upload the videos, this app also offers the user to create the content in the app itself with available editing and video filters options. The best thing about this app is that you can share your videos directly to Whatsapp, Facebook, and even convert them into live wallpapers.

An algorithm that made TikTok so popular:-

Let’s see how exactly TikTok works with its rich features one by one:-

TikTok’s algorithm considers many factors like user interaction, user information, demography, device type, etc, and creates a page for you analyzing all the above-mentioned criteria. Before creating an account one has to select the interested video category.

Brief stats of the app:-

1. TikTok has around more than 800 million users around the globe.

2. As per Senson Tower survey, TikTok has been the most popular app on App Store and Google Play with more than 2 billion downloads.

3. The latest research has been done on TikTok users and the results were astonishing. The research says that the app is more popular among men as compared to women and the people between the ages of 16-24 years are using this app more.

4. On average, a user tends to spend around 52 minutes on this app daily.

5. A survey conducted by AppTrack says that TikTok is available in 155 countries.

The Making of TikTok, its Features & Technologies:-

For creating an app like TikTok it is necessary to start with basic features and adding more complex features later on. App developers can start building such an app using MVP.

It will be more expensive and will take more time to make a clone of TikTok but mobile app development dubai has been drastically improved and App developers can start with some basic features and test it by launching it. Once the app is launched it is easy to take feedback from the users and improve the existing features and then, later on, integrate more advanced features.

Getting investors from tech hub places like Dubai, USA is not easy, if you don’t have an app with basic features. Hence, an app developer needs to have at least a working app with minimum features before approaching the investors.

We have done extensive research on TikTok and categorized its features into two: Basic & Advanced.

Let us describe both categories in detail:-

The Basic Features of TikTok:-

Login or Sign up: A user can login or create an account in TikTok using the phone number or email address or he/she can use the social login like Google, Facebook login credentials and the app will fetch all the information from your social login account.

Edit Profile: You can always edit your profile with the desired profile picture, gender, and bio, etc. Adding more details will help the app to know you better.

Upload Videos: It attracts more users as it offers the ease to upload the videos by a single click.

Filters & Effects: Not every user is a video editor. Hence the app offers the few basic features like color correction, skin tone adjustment, add element layers, speeding up the video, etc, allowing users to can make their videos more effective and professionally edited.

Hearts & Commenting: Similar to other social platforms, TikTok also has a feature where users can like the video and comment on it. It’s a great feature for the content creator who gets frequent feedback on their creativity.

Sharing: An app is not complete if a user can’t share its content on other social media platforms. TikTok gives you the content sharing feature on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., for more popularity and flexibility to gain more limelight.

Notifications: To keep users updated on the likes, comments, or any other updates on their video it’s a great idea to enable notifications on the app. It can be done on Google Cloud messaging on Android phones and Apple push notifications on IOS.

Admin Panel: Admin panel is a place that gives you information about your video and control over the content. You can add, edit, delete, or block users anytime and it shows the stats of your content like counts, number of likes, etc.

The Advanced Features:-

It is enough for an app to have basic features. However, when an app gets more users an app development team needs to pay attention to what users are demanding and how your team can integrate more advanced features to make it more popular. Here are few advanced features TikTok is offering –

Video Preview before registration: TikTok allows new users to preview popular videos to watch before registering an account. However, to comment on or like a particular video one has to get registered.

Location-Based Content: One of the best features that have been developed by TikTok app development team is location-based content. This feature can detect your device location and shows your videos based on your location. Of course, you don’t want to watch a Spanish video if you don’t understand the language right!

Real-Time Analysis: Real-time analysis is used to know how many users are currently watching graphically. Also, you can see how many comments & hearts are there for your video instantly.

Live video streaming: Since TikTok is lacking this feature; one can take this feature and add into their app.

AR Filters: Augmented Reality feature can change your hair color, eye color, skin tone etc. This is a great feature to engage and attract more users. If you are interested more in AR Filters we have developed an awesome AR Library which you can access on Github for ARFaceDetection.

You can add more and more features in your app based on the above points and taking user feedback. However, it’s a good idea to launch your app with a few basic features and work on advanced features later on.

How to move forward to create an app like TikTok:-

Required Team and Technologies:-

Team:-

• Business Analyst
• Project Manager
• UI/UX Designer
• Android Developer
• iOS Developer
• Backend Developer
• QA Analyst

There are two aspects, which you have to consider. Either you can develop this app with the in-house team or you can outsource this project. Each aspect has a few advantages and disadvantages.

If you want to develop the app with the in-house team it’s easy to communicate with your designers and developers and update them instantly, however you need to take rent expenses, equipment expenses, etc., into consideration. On the other hand outsourcing, the project on a fixed or hourly rate can give you maximum output with high-quality assurance.

Factors affecting the final price:-

The final price depends on many factors like the technology used, design, application features (The more the number of features, the more it will cost), and the in-house team for mobile app developers. Let’s discuss it in detail:-

Platform: There are two major platforms on which you have to work on, Android and iOS. Many developers are trying to acquire both platforms, however, since you are just starting it is your choice to either go forward for both the platforms of you can choose one now. Study shows that Android has more users than iOS, so it’s wise to choose Android if you are having budget constraints.

Design: Users like user-friendly design rather than a complex one. In most cases, the majority of users are not from a technical background and hence this will be a challenge for your UI/UX designer to match the expectations.

Cost to make Design:-

Development Team: It’s all about the region. If you want to hire a Mobile development team from Asia continent it will be a cost-saver for you, on the other hand, if you are trying to get your team from USA it will be more costly. But if you are on the clock, you need to do the calculation and create a team in different regions in such a way that your app gets ready quickly. Although it’s hard and expensive to manage a big team if you are in a mission you can surely do that.

Mobile development hourly rate by region:-

TikTok like app development with basic features (MVP) cost estimation:-

As discussed earlier, the cost of app development service depends on the features and functionally. The more features you add to the app the more it will cost and take more time too. Here is a table that will help you to understand how much time it will take to design an app with MVP.

Now let’s take a look at the advanced features time-line. Since we are trying to make an app like TikTok, we need to integrate advanced features to see how much it will cost us. Here is the table where you can get a rough idea of advanced features development time frame:-

So, now that we have all the things in our hand lets calculate the estimated cost of app development concerning the platform. Here is a table that shows you how much it will cost you to design and develop both basic and advanced featured apps like TikTok.

So now that you got a complete estimation of the app development cost it’s totally up to you how you can implement it. All the time frame and cost given in the statistics above are taken from the internet. The above statistics will surely benefit you in developing a feature-rich app.