The popular lifestyle app Lemon8, launched by the Chinese social media giant ByteDance four years ago, is gaining increasing popularity in the United States. The company’s flagship short video platform TikTok may face a ban from the world’s largest economy.
Lemon8 is described as a combination of Instagram and Pinterest, it is a content management platform characterized by long blog-style posts that emphasize photos rather than videos. Users can browse, save, and interact with popular content including fashion, travel, food, and health.
Since April 7th, it has been the most downloaded lifestyle application on the US Apple App Store, surpassing Pinterest and dating platform Tinder.
According to the application analysis provider Data.ai, from April 26th to 27th, it was briefly replaced by Pinterest.
For American Android device users, in the past month, Lemon8’s lifestyle app on Google Play ranked between 10th and 19th. This puts Lemon8 behind Pinterest and Amazon’s Alexa but ahead of the online publishing platform Substack.
ByteDance launched Lemon8 in Japan in March 2020, initially known as Sharee. It was introduced in the United States and the United Kingdom in February last year. The application can also be used in Southeast Asian regions such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.
SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Lemon8 Exceeds One Million Downloads in Japan
The strong interest from various parts of the United States towards Lemon8 indicates that ByteDance’s strategic move to launch this platform last year seems to be paying off. In the same month, US lawmakers reintroduced a bill to ban TikTok.
At that time, TikTok had been negotiating a national security agreement with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for over two years. This committee is an interagency body that reviews certain transactions involving foreign investment.
In 2020, then US President Donald Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to sell its US operations over concerns that user data could be transferred to the Chinese government. TikTok has consistently denied these allegations.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Post, ByteDance has been paying TikTok influencers to promote the relatively unknown Lemon8 app in the United States.
According to data from Data.ai, Lemon8 has also ranked among the top three lifestyle applications for iOS users in markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in the past month. As of Monday, Lemon8 ranks 20th in the iOS lifestyle applications in Japan.
US President Joe Biden signed legislation last month that mandates TikTok be removed from US app stores unless ByteDance divests its American operations of the short video platform. Biden set a deadline of January 19 – one day before his term ends – but he can grant a three-month extension if he determines that ByteDance is making progress.
ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, denied a report by the American digital publication “The Information” that claimed it was exploring a plan to sell the majority stake of TikTok’s US business and insisted that there is no plan to divest the business.
TikTok stated that its goal is to challenge the U.S. measures in court.
SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Lemon8 Aims to Compete with Xiaohongshu
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