Tech

There’s a TikTok phone now

Yes, really.

ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, is releasing its own smartphone, called the Jianguo Pro 3. It’s a successor to the line of handsets from Smartisan, another Chinese tech company, and comes with ByteDance’s own services baked in. You can only get this phone in China, unsurprisingly.

Americans, don’t get excited — It’s unlikely this phone would make its way to the United States in the current climate, especially with news breaking that U.S. regulators are investigating ByteDance’s acquisition of TikTok over national security concerns. Other Chinese smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi have dismissed ideas of expanding to America, and besides the one exception in TikTok, no Chinese services have managed to find success in the United States. It’s unclear how they’d be able to stand out.

For true TikTok fans — According to Engadget, the Jianguo Pro 3 will let users launch Douyin (the Chinese name for TikTok) by swiping up on the lock screen, and they can also apply TikTok filters to video directly in the camera app. Besides the short video platform, ByteDance also owns popular news apps Toutiao and TopBuzz but the company hasn’t mentioned any possible integrations of those.

Amazon and Facebook have both tried branded phones stateside with little to show for it, but the Chinese market is a different beast. Consumers there are heavily reliant on digital services like AliPay and WeChat for making purchases and navigating their lives. TikTok reportedly has 250 million daily active users in China alone.

The Jianguo Pro 3 is mostly unremarkable as far as Android phones go, featuring a mid-tier Snapdragon chipset and four cameras. It’s on sale in China now and retails for 2,899 yuan (about $412).