How To See If Someone Is Active On TikTok?

Social media has made quite an immense impact on humanity, especially the newer generation where we have younger ones who love to express themselves via this medium of communication. TikTok is one of the social media platforms that has been a sensation since its launch in 2016 and its immense growth that began in 2017, leading to a huge amount of users using the platform for various reasons. With the number of users on the platform, some find it important to know if someone is active on TikTok, leading us to ask if you can see when someone is active on TikTok.

Unfortunately, you cannot tell when someone is actively using the TikTok using its built-in functions because there is no status indicator or other feature that informs you of other users’ activity on the application. However, there are ways to determine when someone is online by working around.

TikTok isn’t really a messaging platform, however, you may want to text someone and also need to know if they are online. In this article, I’ll discuss if TikTok has built-in functions that let users know the activity of other users and also share with you some steps that may enlighten you on the activity of other users.

Can You See If Someone Is Active On TikTok?

Using TikTok‘s built-in functions, it’s impossible to determine if someone is active on the social media platform. This is because, in the development process of the application, the function for users to be able to view other users’ activities on the platform wasn’t included. 

This may be due to the platform’s user data policy as the social media platform agrees to not share user data with third-party or other users. 

The platform is popularly known for being a medium for video content creation and sharing, letting users create videos of themselves using various available edit filters on the platform. The videos are then shared with other users and fans on the platform, however, some users want to know the activity of other users to be able to interact with them by sending them a direct message (popularly known as “DM”). 

This may inform the users of the recency of their recipient’s activity on the platform, leading to the need to see if they were recently active on the platform to get their messages quickly. 

While the above is a reason for some users to want to know the activity of other users, some other categories of users of TikTok may want to know someone’s activity on the platform to determine the recency of their content or videos. That way, they can determine if the TikTok video they’re viewing is a new one or a very old one. Moreso, knowing the activity of someone informs them about how well the person is present on TikTok and if they can easily reach them via the platform. 

While all of the above reasons are valid reasons for users to want to know the activity of someone on the platform, TikTok doesn’t have a built-in function that helps users easily note or determine this. This may be due to the customer data policy signed by TikTok, however, TikTok doesn’t give a valid reason for not having a built-in activity status function. 

But, for the sake of objectivity, it does make sense to assume that TikTok doesn’t want to share this information between its users because it could lead to a lot of discrepancies between them especially if some users don’t want their activity status being shared with other users. 

Although TikTok doesn’t have a built-in function that indicates the activity of its users, there are various ways you can determine the activity of users on the platform. You can do this by using TikTok’s notification as one method of determining the decency of a user’s activity (this is only exclusive to when the user is a part of your contacts) or by using older app versions of TikTok which is a very complicated step because, at some later time, the app may stop working. 

How To See If Someone Is Active On TikTok

To understand the possibilities of someone being active on TikTok, there’s the need to clarify what it means to be active on TikTok. Anytime a user logs in to TikTok on their mobile phone or any other smart device, that is what is considered to be “active”. 

Being active doesn’t necessarily mean how much time the user spends on the app but can be said to be every instant a user logs in to the app to use the platform on their mobile devices or any other smart device that can access the application or the desktop version of TikTok. 

TikTok interacts directly with the device, creates data and collects the data from the interaction made with the device. This is a very different process from that used by popular social media platforms like Facebook or Facebook messenger. 

These apps provide a visible active status that indicates when a user is active on the platform. Typically, a green dot appears next to a user’s name to indicate their activity status on the platform. However, this is entirely different from TikTok’s own as TikTok doesn’t have that kind of coloured activity indicator or dot built-in. 

TikTok isn’t built to let users know when other users are logged in or actively using the application or website. There is also no such indicator that directly says “X user has been online since 30 minutes ago”. TikTok is one app that prioritizes “mystery” and goes further with the mystery by not providing timestamps for videos that are posted.

This means, that whenever a video is posted, you cannot view or easily determine when a video was originally uploaded using the application’s features. The only easy and obvious way TikTok allows you to view the activity of others is via live streaming because TikTok differentiates live broadcasts from video recordings posted on the application. Hence, if someone is presently live streaming, you know that they are active on the platform. 

This means that if you’re trying to keep up with the activity of another user, you’ll need to try harder than you would on most social media apps. There are two ways you can possibly determine the activity of other users. The following are the ways:

TikTok Notifications

Using the platform’s notification system is one way you can determine the activity of other users on TikTok. However, to better inform yourself about the activity, you’ll need to do a little bit of thinking coupled with some strategy to infer when people are online or not. This is not a really hard step as TikTok’s notification works just like any other social media app. 

Firstly, if your contacts are synced to your TikTok, you can easily determine when the contact is online whenever they drop their first video because TikTok will alert you when your contact drops their first video on the platform. This way you know that for the alert to come in at that time, the user is possibly active on the platform at that time. However, you need to be strategic with this because TikTok’s alert doesn’t come in immediately after the user drops a video on the platform as there may be a time delay before you receive the alert. 

Secondly, while you’re using the app, TikTok’s notification can send you an alert that someone interacted (like, comment, mention, or follow) with your profile or post. For instance, while you’re using the application in real-time and someone like your or comments on your video, you can easily determine that the user is logged in and active at that particular time. 

Using An Older Version Of TikTok

This is a more complicated step as it isn’t a straightforward process. It’s pretty tough to get an old version of TikTok except if you’re using an Android device with which you can download an old version of the device, however, after some time, the app will stop working, hence the reason for the complication of the process. So if you’re using an Android device, try installing an older version of TikTok to be able to see more direct activity. 

Prior to June 2020, TikTok didn’t always hide user statuses and other activity related actions. So if you can try to download an older version of TikTok, you may be able to access the direct activity of users. But the major challenge is looking for an older version of TikTok because whenever an application is updated on every AppStore, the prior older version application is removed from the database. 

You might be able to get it from third party sites on the internet, however, you won’t be able to get an older build from TikTok’s administrators themselves because they automatically remove the older versions from websites or stores where they host the application for users to download. TikTok also doesn’t support users using older versions of the application. 

So if you do find an older version and it’s compatible with your device, you can install it on your device. Before you do this, you may need to delete the recent version of TikTok on your device if you already have it installed on your device. After installing the older version, you will be able to view the same activity identifiers just as you can on older social media platforms and you can also see who has visited your profile.