This app could potentially supplant Tik Tok overtime. As Tik Tok’s censorship following it’s acquisition by US investors such as Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, and UpScrolled already having questionable ethics, this may be the path forward.
Is it ready? It’s been promised for a year or so now and was only available available by some signup list.
It’s available, but I don’t know about ready. You can register freely, you can download a phone app (through apk) and you can scroll. When I tried it the other week it still failed to deliver any worthwhile content in a quick enough time. I don’t think the recommendation algorithm is good enough (although there also just isn’t a ton of stuff on there in general).
It does also lack a lot of features, I think the biggest one is a built-in editor. Right now every video must be single take and that’s going to be in the way of mass adoption.
I think it’s hurting them that it says “join the beta”. To me, that means being put on a waitinglist and hoping to be picked. Better wording would’ve been “Join us (in beta)” or simply “join us”. Only now did I click on it and found out that I had to download a raw apk. Which brings me to the next point: it’s only on the iOS App Store. The majority of phone users on the planet (overwhelmingly so) are Android users. Why target the minority first? And why provide the majority with a link to a file that requires extra actions? It should be on the Google Store and on F-Droid first, then the App Store.
Anyway, I’m not the target audience, nor am I a programmer, so I’m grateful that somebody is putting in the work. Hopefully they can convince enough people to join and get off of closed-source platforms!