Having fended off challenges in the short-form video sphere since its late 2016 launch, it now appears TikTok is playing offense, laying the groundwork for a photo-sharing app that has drawn comparisons to Instagram and Pinterest. Avid TikTok users are probably familiar with a feature that lets them post still images as moving images that can be examined by advancing frame-by-frame. Now TikTok seems to want to improve that approach by building a separate TikTok Photos app to which users of the primary platform can export and showcase their still images to Android and iOS.

“TikTok currently lets users share multiple photos in slideshow-style videos,” and its next step may be “to level up the photo-sharing game,” reports PhoneArena.

The development was detected by an Android blogger in India, who decided to use some downtime decompiling TikTok’s APK, or Android Package Kit. In it, he found embedded code for something called “TikTok Photos,” posting the results — complete with strings of code —  to the website TheSpAndroid.

Code examples “clearly hint toward a new app called ‘TikTok Photos’” for “sharing photos … and reaching other like-minded people who enjoy photo posts,” explains the post on TheSpAndroid. TikTok in 2020 became illegal in India along with about 60 Chinese apps banned due to national security concerns.

“The rumored app is expected to allow current TikTok users to kick off their TikTok Photos journey by importing or syncing the photos they’ve already shared publicly on TikTok,” according to Android Central. Phrases included in the code assembly such as “Share this post to TikTok Photos” and “Reach other like-minded people who enjoy photo posts” hint at “the features and functionality” of what appears to be TikTok’s upcoming photo-sharing service.

Android Authority characterizes TheSpAndroid deconstruction as “an APK teardown,” which “helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code” but is far from definitive, explaining “it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.”