Being straight about this upfront: Chrome's Web Store policy doesn't allow extensions whose main job is downloading video from sites like TikTok and YouTube, so this one is distributed directly instead — a zip file you load yourself. It takes about a minute and Chrome will only warn you because it's "unpacked," not because anything is wrong.
manifest.json — that whole folder is the extension, keep it somewhere it won't get moved or deleted later.chrome://extensions into the address bar and press Enter.manifest.json directly inside it, not a parent folder).Updating later: there's no auto-update outside the Web Store. When a new version comes out, download the new zip, unzip it over (or instead of) the old folder, go back to chrome://extensions, and click the reload icon (↻) on the Video Downloader card.
Yes — it's how any extension is allowed to detect that you're on a TikTok/Douyin/YouTube video page at all. The extension only ever acts on those three domains; see the privacy policy for exactly what it does and doesn't do with that access.
Refresh the video page and wait for it to fully load before clicking the icon — TikTok often loads video data after the initial page render.
Reload the page. If it still doesn't show up, remove and re-load the unpacked extension, then reload the TikTok tab.
Not directly — Chrome on Android/iOS doesn't support loading unpacked extensions. This is a desktop-browser tool.