Scooping up the market: How did TikTok break past the American giants?

TikTok has a community of 200 million users in India, the company claims. So how did ByteDance push its way through and how has it held its own?

In a market dominated by American social media networks, ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns both TikTok and Helo, has cut itself a large slice of the Indian market, especially outside its metros. Both its short video-sharing apps have ranked as the top two breakout social apps of 2019 in India (App Annie, State of the Mobile 2020), which is also their largest market outside China. 

While Helo has cornered the vernacular, new-data user market, Tiktok has blazed through tier-2 and tier-3 towns. A spokesperson for ByteDance said that increased internet penetration and adoption of smartphones has fuelled its popularity.