It is unfortunate that there’s less diversity of competition, but the loss of trust happened for a reason.
They kind of dug themselves in hole with how sketchy the app is
A recent example is the app was caught reading the user clipboard in iOS 14 beta but a lot of other apps were also caught red handed. The oft-cited national security risk about ByteDance providing user info to Chinese government is a bit overblown, when the NSA has been spying on its own citizens for years...
This article further shows the point I was trying to make: not saying tiktok is in the right here but the media focus on tiktok for the entire article and then tag on the full list of 32 apps towards the end of the article in bullet points.
This does not seem specific to tiktok at all. Would you jump in on discussions on LinkedIn and claim "Not surprised, given how sketchy LinkedIn is?"
https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...
Stateside, I'm discouraged to see it's VC firms making bids (according to the article), as then it may become a play on how to flip this to Facebook as they are the only ones actually monetizing social media.
Countries using foreign products will be more and more wary of espionnage.
Attempts at local data residency are encouraging. Yet they are still a far cry from what is needed.
Despite the controversy with its personal data leakage, TikTok has been massively successful and put the established players like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube on alert. Competition forces companies to improve and just as we need Android to hold iOS accountable, etc TikTok is a good counterbalance to Facebook.
Another dimension is that the tech space is either dominated by U.S. companies or regionally segmented (e.g. Whatsapp in Europe, Wechat in China). TikTok was exciting as a non-U.S. product that grew viral globally. If ByteDance is forced to sell to a U.S. company, then it's back to the status quo.