Byte, a TikTok competitor, has been purchased by Clash, another TikTok competitor. Clash plans to merge its monetisation features into Byte and ultimately rebrand the app under the Clash name. The company hopes to make a short-form video app with rich monetisation tools that allow creators to easily get paid. Clash co-founder Brendon McNerney told that the two apps will be released “together as one product” within a few months. “The market for apps that let you create and post videos from your phone has become extremely saturated. There are many competitors with similar (or better) feature sets, and far more distribution,” Byte creator Dom Hofmann, who was previously a co-founder of the video app Vine, wrote. The combination of the two apps speaks to the immense challenge any company will face going up against TikTok – let alone an independent company without a huge corporate backer and an existing network of apps to prop it up. A ton of TikTok-alikes have popped up throughout 2020, and the smaller apps now face competition not just from TikTok but from TikTok clones built into huge apps like Instagram and Snapchat.

Tweetbot 6 brings a monthly subscription and other essential updates to its app

Tweetbot has long been one of the best third-party Twitter applications around for the iPhone and Mac, and it now sees the launch of the latest version for iOS: Tweetbot 6, which converts the app into a paid subscription service instead of the single-time purchase that was previously offered. The new app makes the change to Twitter’s new API that the company introduced last summer, enabling some long-missing features in the premium Twitter app like Twitter cards and polls. That change does come with some trade-offs, though, including the removal of user-selected options for URL shortening, image uploads, and video uploads. Existing users may find the update to be a bit frustrating, given that Tweetbot 5 had previously been a single-time purchase for $4.99. At $0.99 per month (or a discounted $5.99 per year), the new app marks a price increase, while offering only a handful of new features to make up the difference. Furthermore, Tapbots will soon stop selling Tweetbot 5 on the App Store, so new users soon won’t have the choice to buy the outdated version for a single-time payment.