Five years ago, almost nobody outside East Asia could pronounce ByteDance. Today, the Beijing-based company controls the most downloaded application of the decade and one of the most-watched media platforms in human history. TikTok, the international face of ByteDance’s short-form video empire, has been downloaded more than four billion times across the App Store and […]
In Silicon Valley, WhatsApp is usually filed under “Meta’s other messenger.” In São Paulo, Mumbai, Jakarta, Lagos and Mexico City, it is the operating system of daily life. The green icon installed on roughly three billion phones is where families coordinate their weekends, where small businesses take orders, where doctors send prescriptions, where teachers share […]
For more than a decade, Instagram defined what aspirational social media looked like: square photographs, perfectly composed grids, an interface that made every user a curator. Then, in late 2019, a competitor that had nothing to do with photography began consuming the attention of Instagram’s most coveted demographic. By August 2020 the response was on […]
Telegram is not, in the strictest sense, a private messenger. Its default chats are not end-to-end encrypted; only its opt-in Secret Chats are. It is not, despite founder Pavel Durov’s branding, a non-commercial project; it now sells subscriptions, advertising and digital collectibles. And it is not, contrary to what its largest channels imply, a neutral […]
The most consequential creative tool of the short-form video era was not developed in Cupertino, San Jose or San Francisco. It was developed in Beijing, shipped on a mobile-first interface, given away for free with a generous offline editor, and tuned to spit out the exact aesthetic that performs well on the For You Page. […]
Outside Asia, “super-app” is a phrase Silicon Valley product managers use in pitch decks. Inside China, it is the unremarkable description of an application a billion people open before breakfast and close after midnight. WeChat — known in mainland China as Weixin — is the single piece of consumer software that comes closest to being […]
If you had described Discord to a Silicon Valley investor in 2014, you would have been ignored. Voice-over-IP for gamers was a saturated category dominated by Mumble, TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. The market was small, the customers were notoriously stingy, and the unit economics on always-on voice rooms were terrible. Yet a decade later, Discord is […]
Two decades after Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon registered Spotify Technology S.A. in Sweden, the company they founded is the world’s largest paid music service, with more than six hundred million monthly active users and roughly two hundred and forty million paid subscribers. It is also one of the most controversial businesses in the global […]
If you have spent any time around a child between the ages of eight and fourteen since 2018, you already know more about Roblox than most technology analysts. The platform has more than ninety million daily active users, with the median user younger than sixteen, and average session lengths that exceed two and a half […]
When YouTube was founded in 2005, no human being alive could have predicted that the most-viewed video on the platform two decades later would be a two-minute Korean children’s nursery rhyme about a family of fish. Yet Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark Dance” passed fifteen billion views in early 2025 and continues to climb at a pace […]