They built upon a French product, every change in the French product was adopted by a copycat (app by tiktok creator).

Every attempt to ban the copycat app on Google store by the French was useless, since a new copycat app would pop up the next second.

So it's not like tiktok is some new innovation. What they did is still amazing, but malevolent, but credit where credit is due.

Wow, I'd never heard this. What French product?

The french product was called Mindie, the start of endless short videos with music, the reels, and the copycat was chinese musical.ly (later bought up by Bytedance).

Mindie failed because they got attacked by copyright claims by the big US tech, which obviously the chinese copycat was immune to, since China.

Interesting. I wonder if any of the Musical.ly creators ever saw Mindie.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/from-a-failing-product-to-...

This sounds like revisionist history.