New Delhi, Xiaomi’s India Managing Director Manu Kumar Jain on Sunday tweeted about meeting Zhang Yiming, Founder and CEO of ByteDance which owns the popular short video-sharing platform TikTok, triggering talks of the app coming pre-installed with Xiaomi phones.
“Inspired meeting Zhang YiMing, Founder CEO of #ByteDance — one of the most valued startups in the world,” Jain said.
“ByteDance runs #TikTok, a very popular video-sharing app. We spoke about fast evolving Indian internet industry,” he added.
“How many of you use #TikTok? Should I try it,” he asked.
While many of Jain’s 2,24,000 followers on Twitter urged him not to use TikTok, some even expressed fear that TikTok may come pre-installed on Xiaomi phones.
“Plz don’t and don’t even think about pre-installing tiktok in your smartphones!” said an user.
“Don’t add tiktok as a bloatware in miui,” wrote another user.
With over 200 million users in the country, India is the biggest market for TikTok. But the popular app has courted controversies in the past.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) last month sought response from TikTok on a set of questions, ranging from whether it is considering storing data within India and what measures they were taking to prevent users below the age of 18 from getting exposed to potentially dangerous content.
ByteDance said it was planning to set up a data centre in India within 6-18 months at an estimated cost of $100 million.
The investment will be a part of the company’s commitment to invest $1 billion in India over three years.
In April this year, the Madras High Court had passed an interim order banning TikTok citing inappropriate and pornographic content. The ban was subsequently lifted.
ByteDance, which also owns the social media platform Helo, now has a portfolio of applications available in over 150 markets and 75 languages.
