How To Develop a Music App Like TikTok?

Why is it so popular? How is it different from other music and video apps? How to develop an app like TikTok? Can your business use the hype? What are the must-have features? How much will the development cost?

Whoa, slow your roll. We’ll cover all these questions, so make a cup of tea or coffee, settle and let’s rock (after all, we’re talking about a music app, right?)!

📱 Music Streaming App vs Video Streaming App vs Social Music Video App

When you decide to make own media app like TikTok it’s crucial to have a clear vision of what you’re building. Differents apps solve different pains and target different audiences so it’s not an idle talk.

If you thought about TikTok as a music or video streaming app, it’s actually different. Let’s see.

Finally, if you want to build an app like TikTok you’re definitely thinking about Social Music Video App. What are their special features?

• Such applications include many video editing tools like masks, filters, frames and so on.
• They allow users combining self-made clips with popular music to make even better content.
• Finally, they rely a lot on social interactions.

Mentioned above features made TikTok the app we know now. Let’s take a closer look at its success story!

👍 What Can We Learn From TikTok’s Popularity?

The social music video application is both TikTok’s definition and the key thing to understand its success. As we’ve figured out earlier, we had great examples of music or video streaming apps earlier but TikTok managed to successfully combine these two concepts and added a powerful social side.

To succeed, you should either be the first or the best. TikTok managed to be both:

1. It became a great tool for content creation. Earlier, if you wanted to put music over a video, you should download a special application, the music you’d like to add and manually combine the visual and audio parts. With TikTok it can be done in a few taps.
2. Social interaction tools within the app are quite predictable - like, share, comment, subscribe. Yet, it turned out to be more than enough to encourage people to create their own content and communicate with other users.

What are the other must-have features to create a similar application? Here they are!

⚙️ Top 7 Features You Need to Develop an App like TikTok

If you plan to create a video-sharing app, the following 7 features should definitely be in your MVP-Backlog.

# 1: Sign Up 🔐

Far gone the days when you should encourage users to sign up at any price. Modern customers want to get something in advance before providing you with their personal information.

📈 How to Use TikTok Hype for Your Business?

The idea to build an application for creating short videos (just like TikTok) may be tricky. Any new direct competitor will probably lose since it’s challenging to compete with TikTok’s brand recognition, popularity, and resources. How can you compete with the company if your total budget is smaller than their weekly marketing expenses only?

Thus, instead of making a copycat, we’d recommend you to take advantage of the hyped TikTok’s mechanics, and integrate it into your existing business or Startup ideas in other industries.

Take Tinder as an example. The mechanics of its most popular feature - swipes - was reused in many other applications from real estate, retail, travel, and other industries. The same may work out with TikTok.

For example, let’s imagine you’re a retailer selling accessories. Let your customers take 15-second clips with your products along with writing text reviews. The best videos may even go to your main page or screen to promote your products and encourage others to buy them.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Oh, sorry, just wanted to sound a bit like Steve 🙂

🛠 Tech Tips

Here are some techincal tools that will be useful during the development:

• To implement the Chat Feature you can use Firebase, QuickBlox or Sendbird SDKs.
• Mirror Reality SDK can be used to implement real-time face effects.
• For Social Login use APIs of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging, Amazon SNS, Urban Airship and OneSignal are one of the best Push Notifications services.
• When looking for a cloud storage you may pay attention to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3 or Azure.

💸 Cost to Build a Video Sharing App like TikTok

For everyone who is interested in video sharing app development costs we preapred a rough estimate. Take a look: