Russia's Yandex releases rival to China's TikTok app

[October 14, 2019]   MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian internet firm Yandex on Monday released a short video app for fashion and style that it hopes will compete with China's TikTok app.

The Yandex app is called Sloy, the Russian word for layer, the company said in a statement.

It is currently only available in App Store in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Its release on Android is planned for 2020, and the company is considering release in Europe and the United States next year, Yandex said.

TikTok, which has more than 500 million users a month and is particularly popular with teenagers in China, allows users to create and share short videos with special effects.

(Reporting by Nadezhda Tsydenova and Anton Zverev; writing by Tom Balmforth and Polina Devitt; editing by Jason Neely)

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