Three days after China’s currently most valuable unicorn Bytedance cried for attention to its hyper popular short video app Tik Tok being banished by Tencent’s WeChat, the blockage is still there.
Beijing-based Bytedance said today that it had made repeated attempts over the past few days to communicate with the WeChat team, asking the latter to remove the ban, which stops an unregistered Douyin users – browsing the app and getting interested – from creating a Douyin account by using their existing WeChat account. Think of it this way, the ban literally forbids an existing WeChat user from becoming a Douyin user.
Douyin added that Tencent, owner of WeChat, had not disclosed reasons for the banning. The startup also denied rumours that an individual’s WeChat contacts data could be duplicated to Douyin platform.
Huang Xu, an analyst, argued that Tencent did not have the obligation to open to Douyin, given that the two were both competing for people’s online time.
Editor: Ben Jiang