The irritation
Friends kept sending me TikTok links even though I did not want the app. The mobile web experience answered by muting the video, covering it with prompts, and pushing me toward an install.
ExperimentReleasedReleased utility
LinkTok
Paste a TikTok video link and watch it in a normal browser without installing TikTok or fighting its app prompts.
- Current state
- Released — Released utility
- Jack’s role
- Concept, Interface design, Development
- Find it in the workshop
- Prototype Bench · Link cartridge
Built because…
The real build story.
What I built
In roughly fifteen minutes, I built a page where you paste one TikTok video URL and press Go. A small Node and Express backend calls TikTok's oEmbed endpoint while a static frontend presents the playable embed.
The hard part
The utility depends on TikTok's embed behavior and only handles video posts; photo carousels are outside the format returned by the integration.
Under the casing
Proof, not decoration.
Build evidence02 items
- A one-link TikTok video viewer built on the oEmbed API
- A Node and Cloud Run backend with a static browser interface
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Express
- TikTok oEmbed
- Cloud Run
Scope of work
What I owned.
- Concept
- Interface design
- Development
No victory-lap math
Outcome and lesson.
Where it landed
LinkTok is a released single-purpose utility for watching a shared TikTok video in the browser, including full-screen and sound, without pretending to be a feed or bookmark manager.
What stayed
Sometimes the useful product is a tiny adapter between a link someone sends and the viewing experience you actually wanted.
Field notes
This project has a physical address.
In the playable workshop, LinkTok lives in the Prototype Bench as a link cartridge. You can inspect it without unlocking anything.