I’m a dev but not very good at mobile.
I can promise you that a lot of engineering work went into making the tiktok scrolling experience so smooth. Part of the trick is having a good enough algorithm that the user wants to watch the majority of served videos.
Another huge part of it is having lightning fast content distribution and aggressive “prefetching” of the next videos in the feed.
I don’t want to discourage you but I also don’t want you to be caught off guard by the difficulty. Do you want to make this bad enough to give it your nights and weekends for a year?
You’re welcome!
So if you didn’t care about having to wait for the video to buffer on every scroll, it becomes an easier problem. I kind of think that defeats the purpose of a tiktok-style interface though.
I agree that you wouldn’t necessarily need to build a new algorithm, but like I said, it’s part of the smooth scrolling magic