A quick note of clarification for TikTok users: 10-minute video uploads are not gone from the app.

Over the past week or so, several TikTok users have noted that the 10-minute recording option has been removed from the UI.

As you can see in this screenshot, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, the option to record a 10-minute clip has disappeared, with 3 minutes now your longest recording option.

That’s prompted many to speculate that TikTok hasn’t seen success with longer clips, which has now seen it move back to shorter uploads, in order to re-focus on its core strength.

Which may be somewhat true, based on what TikTok tells us about the change:

“We have not removed 10 minute videos – users can still upload videos up to 10 minutes. There was an earlier experiment that allowed select users to also record videos up to 10 minutes from the TikTok app, but that has since ended.”

So TikTok says that the only element that’s been depreciated is the capability to record 10-minute videos within the camera UI, and that users can still upload longer videos if they wish. But the recording process was only a test, and TikTok’s now removed it.

This could reflect two things – for one, it likely does suggest that 10-minute uploads haven’t been hugely popular, so TikTok sees no reason to keep supporting that functionality in the app. That doesn’t mean that no one’s seen success with longer content, but it seems that either it wasn’t being used a lot, or that users aren’t responding to longer clips, which is why TikTok’s taking it away as a direct, in-stream choice.

It could also suggest that the longer videos which have been uploaded to the app have generally been edited and crafted in other tools, with pro users taking the time to create more engaging, polished clips, that they’re then uploading into the app. Which they don’t need the in-app recording functionality for – and really, if you’re uploading longer TikTok clips, you’re probably going to need to edit them and shape them into a compelling narrative, which would make the TikTok camera less necessary in this respect.

So, the bottom line is that 10-minute uploads are still available on TikTok, but you can’t record them in the app. But you probably weren’t anyway, so probably not a massive change.