Building an App Like TikTok: The Ultimate Tech Stack

Did you know that TikTok is not the only video editing app that attracts millions of users? Such applications as Likee or Byte are now becoming powerful TikTok’s competitors. Additionally, more and more similar solutions are getting popular each month.

So, yes, now is a great time to roll out your own video editing and sharing app. How can you do that? We talked about all steps in great detail in this article. As for now, let’s focus on the essential aspect of the app development process: choosing all the right tools.

Developing for the platforms

The first step of developing any kind of app is to decide which market to target: iOS, Android, or maybe both. Depending on this decision, your tech stack will vary.

If you go for an iOS app, a Swift or Objective-C developer has to be on the team. At the same time, you can choose between Kotlin, Java, or C# for an Android app. Of course, there are more languages for each platform, but those are the most widely used ones.

If you go for both iOS and Android apps, there is one more option: cross-platfrom development. Frameworks like Flutter or React Native allow building one application for both platforms, which, of course, saves you time and budget.

Database management

Now, let’s move on to the backend part of our app. TikTok-like apps usually contain quite a lot of information, especially when it comes to user data. All of this has to be organized and managed correctly, so you can retrieve any info when needed.

There are many database management solutions; the most commonly used options are MySQL and MongoDB.

Cloud integration

It is hard to imagine any mobile app without cloud integration, especially when it comes to solutions that rely heavily on content sharing. Cloud is a must for an application similar to TikTok — it helps users edit videos and see the changes right away as well as upload their content. All the videos also need to be stored somewhere to make them easily accessible on the app.

As for the cloud providers, you might consider AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as good options.

AR filters

All those video effects and filters are probably the main reason why so many people start using TikTok and similar apps in the first place. It is important to have a good selection of the augmented reality filters as well as allow your users to create some on their own.

To make all of this possible, you need to add AR integration to your to-do list. The tool choice depends on your platform; for instance, ARCore is Google’s SDK (software development kit) for Android devices, while ARKit is the one created for iOS.

Real-time analytics

One more aspect to take care of is the in-app analytics. Clearly, you need to understand what kind of interactions your users are engaged in and which features they like the most.

To do that, your development team has to integrate some real-time analytics tools, for example, Azure Stream Analytics or Google Analytics.

Adding the chat feature

Finally, let’s not forget about messaging — it is an essential part of your video editing and sharing app. Users should have the possibility to send each other messages and exchange content. There are many live chat tools available on the market, such as Twilio or Agora.

Is there anything else?

Of course, there are some more tools you would want to use to create an excellent TikTok-like app. For instance, you would also need to work on notification management or geolocation integration. It all depends on how complex you want your app to be.

Remember that getting an app similar to TikTok is not as complicated as it might seem, especially if you find a reliable team to trust with the task.

Have some more questions? In our recent blog post, we discussed each aspect of building a video editing and sharing app just like TikTok — give it a read!