Facebook’s new ‘Collab’ app is heavily inspired by TikTok

Collab is developed by Facebook's New Product Experimentation group and is currently invite-only on iOS.

Facebook’s new ‘Collab’ app is heavily inspired by the popular short video app TikTok. With Collab, users can mix and match original videos and music. Developed by Facebook’s new product experimentation group, Collab is currently invite-only on iOS.

The app, which is currently in beta, allows users to record three separate short-form videos of them playing various instruments like drums or guitar or singing vocals. Facebook says users don’t need any experience in music to add their own recordings.

“With the app, you can create your own arrangement by adding in your own recording or by swiping and discovering an arrangement to complete your composition,” explained NPE’s announcement.

Once you have created a collab, you can publish it for others to watch and mix and match further. While it may sound as if Facebook is trying to copy TikTok but that is not the case. Instead of making a clone of TikTok, Collab is more about music creation as well as a video. Even if Facebook’s Collab is different from TikTok, both the apps fall in the same genre.

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Nevertheless, the popularity of TikTok has made Facebook nervous. Released in 2016, the app has been downloaded over 2 billion times. TikTok, the social network lets users share short video clips of themselves singing, dancing and making pranks. The app is popular across the globe, especially in India where TikTik has over 200 million users of which 120 million are active on a monthly basis. ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is reportedly around $110 billion. The Beijing-headquartered ByteDance also owns Duoyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and Toutiao, a news service.

Facebook said Collab will be initially made available in the US and Canada. Users can sign up and start using the app. Separately, Facebook also announced a new audio-calling app called Catchup that lets you set up a phone call with up to eight persons. The app which comes from Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team