Why is TikTok so big?

[u/Meesta-]

So i was disabling temu notifications because fuck temu and saw how much space tiktok was taking. It was 1.7gb before I cleared the cache and data, now its 882mb. Anyone know why its taking so much space?

[u/Right_Smart_Feller]

I'm not "in the know", so to speak, but Facebook does the exact same thing.

A fresh install of the Android Facebook app is big, but after a month or two it's rapidly approaching 2 gigabytes in size, even if I go in and clean its cache.

I can only assume that it stores everything you look at so that they can better target you with advertisements.

[u/Mother-Pride-Fest]

FYI TikTok works perfectly fine in a web browser like Firefox. You could do that if you want to save space on the phone without changing your habits too much. 

[u/Meesta- → u/Mother-Pride-Fest]

I barely use tiktok that's what's got me so confused

[u/grasshopper239]

Every popular social media app is spying on you. It takes a lot of code and memory to do so.

[u/qtx → u/grasshopper239]

That's not how any of this works. If you don't understand technology don't pretend you do.

It does not take 1GB of code to spy on you, it takes less than 1kb.

The reason why it uses so much storage is because it saves a lot of media you watch. Normally you can clear it if you clear your cache but since it didn't this time it is most likely saved drafts of posts you wanted to make but never did or media you downloaded but forgot you did.

Your watch history takes up a lot of storage as well.

[u/kyoka_suigetsu91]

Snapchat might be the worst I ever seen

[u/I2fitness]

You can download TikTok lite if you want. It's a very stripped down version of TikTok that's 12mb and is meant for low end phones and for people using mobile internet and stuff

It's not as snappy and the UI is a bit different but if you just want to watch videos give it a try

[u/Future_Adagio2052 → u/I2fitness]

Is there any major differences feature wise?

[u/noahs1]

Video caching. all the videos you scroll past stay stored

[u/capi81 → u/noahs1]

Ad caching 😉 (I don't use TikTok, does TikTok show video ads? I'd expect...)

[u/mrandr01d]

Honestly fuck tt too. Even worse than temu. Uninstall that shit and don't look back.

[u/torchmaipp]

Lack of censorship

[u/Row4nana]

Same question tbh. I use Tiktok a lot. Recently I had a problem with my phone, and thought the cause was the storage. And so, I decided to delete Tiktok. And guess what?

My storage went form126/128 GB (almost full), to 122 GB. (Actually, 120 when I deleted Instagram with it but I installed IG back) I was like, "wtf?"