Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok developed by Beijing-based ByteDance, launched a location-based social feature on Monday that allows users to find people nearby by shaking their phones, replicating a feature almost identical to one that has long existed in Tencent Holdings’ WeChat in a move widely seen as a challenge to the latter’s dominance in social networking.
The feature called dou yi dou, which roughly translates as “shake it”, allows users to shake their phones and see others doing the same nearby, then add each other to their friends lists. It works similarly to WeChat’s yao yi yao, which helped popularise the super app in its early days by making it easy to add new contacts.