One of the very interesting and cool features iOS 15 brought to iPhones is SharePlay: the ability to listen to music, watch TV shows, play games, and enjoy other activities on the phone while on a FaceTime call with your friends or family members. Now, TikTok is one of the apps taking advantage of the feature with a new “For Us” page, reports 9to5Mac.
Explore TikTok’s “For Us” page on a FaceTime call with your friends
The popular video-sharing app TikTok is now bringing a special touch to FaceTime with SharePlay on iOS 15 devices. The change was first noted by Twitter user Aether Aurelia. The new thing is, basically, the page that was supposed to be the “For You” page on TikTok, during a FaceTime call with SharePlay, it has been transformed to “For Us”.
The “For Us” page combines the users’ favorite recommendations and therefore makes the shared experience with browsing TikTok short videos an even more entertaining one. The page seems to display something of a mix of the interests of the participants in the FaceTime with SharePlay call.
When Apple introduced SharePlay during the WWDC21, this type of thing was what Cupertino had in mind for the feature. Sharing what you’re doing and enjoying more activities together during a FaceTime call.
Here’s how to use SharePlay with TikTok on your iPhone or iPad
- Upgrade your iPhone or iPad to iOS 15.1
- Start a FaceTime call (the people you’re FaceTiming with also need to have updated their device to iOS 15.1)
- Open TikTok, then tap on the SharePlay button
- Share your screen with the other people in the FaceTime call
- Then, the page that is “For You” on TikTok will become “For Us”
- To end SharePlay or screen sharing, tap the icon for Sharing you screen on FaceTime
TikTok’s popularity is growing steadily in recent years
The short-video sharing social media platform has been steadily growing in popularity, forcing its rivals such as Facebook and Instagram to also create a means to share short videos on their platforms.
Recently, we reported on the fact that TikTok’s users have reached the 1 billion users milestone.
TikTok has now evolved and has become something far more than just a social media platform for entertainment. Like all other popular social media apps, it has been thoroughly monetized with ads, sponsorship deals, and others. Additionally, it has also been the place for growing businesses to make themselves known to the world in short, engaging videos, as long as they manage to nail the unique style of TikTok.
What’s more, the platform also now has plenty of educational content, with learning channels managing to fit whole micro-tutorials, scientific experiments, and other educational or interesting information in TikTok’s short-form videos.
Currently, TikTok is number 7 in terms of ranking against other social media apps, and it follows the Chinese messaging app WeChat. However, it still has some progress to achieve before catching up with Facebook, which is currently ranked number one with a bit more than 2.7 billion monthly active users. Right behind Facebook is YouTube, which has about 2.3 billion active users every month.
As we already mentioned briefly earlier, TikTok has inspired its competitors to work towards the short-video sharing capabilities of their apps. For example, Instagram’s Reels, which has now been around for a year and a bit, is a way for content creators to publish short videos on Instagram. Facebook, on the other hand, has also recently launched Reels, trying to benefit from the growing popularity of the format. YouTube also has YouTube Shorts to answer to the growing interest in shorter videos.
