Google’s Area 120 team launches Tangi to compete with TikTok, Byte

ByteDance's TikTok, a short-video making platform has garnered millions of users in a couple of years, so much so that it recently became one of the top downloaded apps on smartphones. More recently, the 6-second video making app called Byte came into existence in a bid to east some of the pie. But the latest development here is the participation of Google with its Tangi app. Google's Area 120 team started working on this new 'experimental' TikTok rival in 2019.

"Tangi is where creative people can get new ideas and connect with other passionate people like them. The name is inspired by the words TeAch aNd GIve and "tangible"—things you can make," adds Coco Mao, team lead at Google's Tangi, in a blog post. It is not a 6-second video making application like Byte but lets users make a 60-second video at the max.

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The app has not been made available to Android users for now. But iPhone users can download it from the App Store. It is even available for web users at tangi.co.

So what are the features of Google's Tangi? In the app, one can see a carousel of all the videos from different sections and can play them by simply tapping on their thumbnails. The interface looks similar to that of Pinterest and the thumbnail shows the artist with the video's length. At the top, users also have different sections like Art, Cooking, DIY, Fashion & Beauty, Lifestyle and others for a more filtered content. There's a search bar on top as well in case users want to see a video in particular. At the bottom, there are three tabs - Home, Notifications and the Profile button from where you can change the profile settings and bio.

As mentioned in the App Store listing page, the app weighs 24.3MB and requires iOS 11 or later to run.