For quite some time now, we’ve been hearing reports and rumours about ByteDance — the company behind popular short video sharing app TikTok — wanting to build its very own smartphone.
It now seems that ByteDance’s plans are getting more concrete and that the company is teaming up with smartphone maker Smartisan to build the smartphone. The company had earlier been reported to be in talks with Smartisan for the project as well, and now ByteDance has released a statement saying, “Before ByteDance jumped to acquire the Hammer Technology team, the hammer was already planning to create a new phone. This new mobile phone project is more of a continuation of the previous plan to meet the demand of the established Hammer mobile phone user base.”
ByteDance had acquired a portfolio of patents along with a team of workers from Smartisan earlier this year.
ByteDance’s most popular product, TikTok, has received a lot of flak in India for perverse content and was also banned temporarily in the country, which resulted in the app being removed from the Play Store and the App Store. It was later unbanned, but the app’s reputation for having illegal, and pornographic content has stuck around.
Either way, a phone built by ByteDance will be looked at with scrutiny and at least some amount of mistrust by users, what will all the drama and scandals associated with TikTok in India.
