Relevance Of Apps

Initially a social media on its way to a meteoric rise, TikTok today has been relentlessly banned in numerous countries. In Nepal, it was banned in 2023 only for the ban to be lifted in August 2024. TikTok is a popular social media app through which users can create and share short videos set to music. Its videos typically range from 15 seconds to 10 minutes and are widely used to showcase dance moves and challenges, quirky filters, lip-syncs, comedy skits, and so on. Released globally in 2016, it skyrocketed in 2020 when the world was mired in pandemic and people needed a way out of the woes of lockdown. 

All of a sudden users’ social media feed was bursting with short videos. As TikTok caught up with giant social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram, it became a steep competitor for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. To counteract this, Meta released a new feature called reels. However, TikTok was hard to dethrone from its height of success until of course countries one after another started banning TikTok.

Why is TikTok held at such a caution? The social media is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and countries worldwide claim that TikTok secretly and illegally collects user information without permission. In the US, TikTok faces an uncertain future as ByteDance has been given an ultimatum to sell the app to a neutral party outside of China. It remains to be seen how TikTok’s fate will fare, but its aim for world domination has been thwarted. 

The world of the internet is vast and there are often highly innovative internet successes that ultimately go bust. Remember MySpace and Vine? The fact is users’ attention span is quite short when it comes to online perusal. They are constantly multitasking: sending emails, checking social media notifications, calling their friends and family through apps, conducting work, and so on. With a few swipes and taps on the smartphones, the internet presents a unique online experience that is today known as scrolling. 

Apps are short for applications and today there are millions of apps online, all of which offer certain services. In this intricate and seemingly infinite online world, apps are constantly jostling for the attention of the users. One of their ploys is to send out notifications when user time slows down. These notifications are alerted to the users through a chime of the text from the app. And it has been successful so far as people keep coming back to apps particularly that of social media. 

Consequently, the youths have become quite addicted to screen time. But even adults are now navigating the terrains of screens. As such, screens have come into the social world and people are addicted. What was essential during lockdown has become an obligatory way to socialise. The more useful an app, the more successful it becomes, turning it into a gold mine for app companies and creators. But if apps were to be gauged according to their utility, where would social media apps range? This is a solemn question that calls for a new way of evaluating such prevalent apps in which teens and adults alike lip-sync and perform for views.