UC Browser is a web browser developed by mobile internet company UCWeb, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. It was the most popular mobile browser in India and Indonesia, and the second most popular one in China as of 2017. Its world-wide browser share as of May 2022 is 0.86% overall according to StatCounter.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location — via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
InMobi is an Indian multinational technology company, based in Bengaluru, India. Its mobile-first platform allows brands, developers and publishers to engage consumers through contextual mobile advertising. The company was founded in 2007 under the name mKhoj by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal.
WeChat and Weixin are a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018 with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long looping video clips. It was originally launched on January 24, 2013, by Vine Labs, Inc. Bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2012 before its launch, the service was shut down on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.
SHAREit is a peer-to-peer file sharing, content streaming and gaming platform that supports online and offline sharing of files and contents. It allows users access to short format videos and a wide range of games making it a multimedia entertainment app for users. It works on various smartphone platforms allowing users to share files between devices directly. SHAREit was developed as part of Lenovo at its initial stage but was later spun off and operated under a separate Singapore based technology company Smart Media4U Technology Pte. Ltd.
Musical.ly was a social media service headquartered in Shanghai with an American office in Santa Monica, California, on which platform users created and shared short lip-sync videos. The first prototype was released in April 2014, and then after that, the official version was launched in August of 2014. Through the app, users could create 15-second to 1-minute lip-syncing music videos and choose sound tracks to accompany them, use different speed options and add pre-set filters and effects. The app also allowed users to browse popular "musers", content, trending songs, sounds and hashtags, and uniquely interact with their fans.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
ZEE5 is an Indian subscription video on-demand and over-the-top streaming service, run by Zee Entertainment Enterprises. It was launched in India on 14 February 2018 with content in 12 languages. The ZEE5 mobile app is available on Web, Android, iOS, Smart TVs, among other devices. ZEE5 claimed 56 million monthly active users in December 2019.
TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.
Likee is a short-video creation and sharing app, available for iOS and Android operating systems. It is owned by Singaporean tech firm BIGO Technology, whose parent company is JOYY Inc., a Chinese firm listed on NASDAQ. The founder of Likee is Jason Hu, entrepreneur from Singapore, who previously worked for JOYY.
Kuaishou Technology is a Chinese publicly traded partly state-owned holding company based in Haidian District (Beijing), founded in 2011 by Hua Su (宿华) and Cheng Yixiao (程一笑). The company is known for developing a mobile app for sharing users' short videos, a social network, and video special effects editor.
Bigo Live is a live streaming platform owned by a Singapore-based Bigo Technology, which was founded in 2014 by David Li and Jason Hu. As of 2019, Bigo Technology is owned by JOYY, a Chinese company listed on the NASDAQ.
ShareChat is an Indian social networking service platform, owned by Bangalore-based Mohalla Tech. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat app has over 350 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The current valuation of the company is $5 billion.
Triller is an American video-sharing social networking service. The service allows users to create and share short-form videos, including videos set to, or automatically synchronized to music using artificial intelligence technology. Triller was released for iOS and Android in 2015, and initially operated as a video editing app before adding social networking features.
Chingari is a video sharing mobile app. In these videos, users have options to add visual effects, lip-sync, dance, or voice over movie scenes and comic dialogues.
Multiple governmental agencies and private businesses have imposed, or attempted to impose, bans on the social media service TikTok. Countries like India and the United States have expressed concerns about the app's ownership by the Chinese company, ByteDance, attempting to ban it from app stores. Countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have banned it on the basis of pornography-related concerns, while others like Armenia and Azerbaijan have implemented restrictions to mitigate the spread of information which could lead to conflict. Syria has banned it allegedly due to human trafficking into Europe and other countries via its shared border with Turkey. Vietnam has threatened to ban the platform if toxic content is not removed.
Glance is an Indian artificial intelligence based software company that delivers personalised content to the lock screens of smartphones. Co-founded in 2019 by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena, and Piyush Shah and headquartered in Bangalore, Glance is owned by InMobi, a multinational technology company.
Josh is a video-sharing social networking service, owned by VerSe Innovation – an Indian technology company based in Bangalore, India. Josh is an Indian short video app that was launched in immediately after the Indian Government banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in June 2020. The founders of the platform have promoted the app as the “Instagram for Bharat” referring to their focus on the Indian audience that speaks its own regional and state languages. Josh was among the top 10 most downloaded apps social and entertainment apps in India of 2021 and had 150 million monthly active users as per April 2022.
YouTube Shorts is the short-form section of the American video-sharing website YouTube, hosting content much like YouTube's primary service but with a focus on vertical videos at a maximum length of 60 seconds. Videos with a square aspect ratio are also accepted. As of January 2022, Shorts have collectively earned over 5 trillion views since the platform was made available to the public on July 13, 2021 which include video views that pre-date the YouTube Shorts feature.
