We're excited to introduce Lynx, a family of tools that empowers developers to use existing web skills to create native user interfaces for mobile and web from a single codebase. Designed for diverse use cases and rich interactivity, Lynx delivers vibrant and engaging UIs for large-scale apps like TikTok, featuring a speedy, versatile rendering engine, performance-driven dual-threaded UI programming, modern Rust-based tooling, and more!

We deeply appreciate all the prior efforts that have shaped the field of cross-platform development and aspire to contribute to this movement by making Lynx open source. We invite all developers to build applications with more freedom and productivity.

Ship native apps at scale and velocity

For millions of young users, mobile phones—and the apps on them—are their first digital experiences. For this app-centric generation, a non-native experience isn't just inconvenient, it's a red flag. A blank screen, a 0.1 second lag in a "like" animation, or an unfamiliar UI pattern can make an interface feel "cheap" or untrustworthy. We believe that native app experiences and responsiveness aren't just nice-to-haves—they are necessities.

Despite the rapid growth of the app economy, delivering such experiences at scale and velocity remains to be a challenge. The growing diversity of form factors and platforms forces developers to rebuild the same experiences multiple times, leading to wasted effort, siloed teams, and delayed time to market. We believe that by enabling developers to build once and reach more platforms, we can deliver native experiences for more users, faster.

TikTok, the globally popular short-video app with a large young user base, gradually adopted Lynx to meet these demands and has increasingly bet on it. Today, Lynx powers a wide range of experiences—from the lightweight, high-frequency Search panel to full-fledged TikTok Studio app; from complex E-commerce shops that demand reliability and trust, to highly engaging experiences like LIVE, and large-scale campaigns such as Disney100 on TikTok and The Met Gala on TikTok.

Making Lynx open source

Lynx was originally developed by a full-time team at ByteDance, who continue to drive its development today. With TikTok actively shaping the open source landscape and heavily adopting Lynx across its mobile apps, TikTok recognizes the innovation and potential of Lynx and offers to host its open-source release, providing funding, technical involvement, community promotion, and ecosystem growth.

More importantly, this is the beginning of the journey. We believe open source is the right path forward: to foster collaboration, push the boundaries of what's possible in cross-platform development, and give back to the community that has given us so much. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey and welcome your feedback and contributions.

[Read the full blog post on Lynx]

Follow Lynx and TikTok for Developers on X.