TikTok, today’s most popular social media application, hosts millions of users every day. TikTok, which has now become the center of many movements, has started to cause concern in some countries. Russia, one of these countries, took action against TikTok.
Russia has developed its own domestic application to reduce the dominance of TikTok, which is part of China-based ByteDance. This application, named ‘Yappy’, was launched in Russia, where there are 40 million TikTok users. Names close to the government played a role in the development of the application.
It has the same functionality as TikTok:
Yappy is basically an app almost completely different from TikTok. Users can share videos up to 60 seconds long, just like TikTok. The interface of the application is also very similar to TikTok.
The daughter of Russian President Putin played a role in the development process:
The app was developed by Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of state-owned gas giant Gazprom. But the development process was indirectly assisted by Katerina Tikhonova, one of the daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During the development of the application, support was received from the Innopraktika Foundation, an organization managed by Katerina Tikhonova.
Russia first put forward the idea of developing a local application to rival TikTok towards the end of 2020. What got things started was TikTok’s rejection of the Russian government’s request to delete posts encouraging him to join unauthorized street protests in support of government critic Alexei Navalny.
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