A PAIR of Chinese-made social apps, Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, have taken over the top two positions on Apple’s iPhone download charts in the US as users seek out alternatives to TikTok ahead of an imminent ban.
ByteDance’s TikTok faces a deadline of Jan 19 to find a US buyer in order to continue operating in the country, and the Supreme Court has signalled it’s unlikely to oppose the law imposing that condition. Short of a policy reversal by president-elect Donald Trump or ByteDance selling its US service, TikTok will be in breach of the law within a week, triggering the search.
Xiaohongshu is China’s closest analogue to Instagram, combining photos, videos and life updates with an increasing push into livestreamed e-commerce. This week, it became the most downloaded free app on iOS and rose to the top 10 on Alphabet’s Google Play store for the first time. Many new users labelled themselves “TikTok refugees” as they joined.
Started in 2013 in Shanghai, Xiaohongshu is widely used by Chinese-speaking communities overseas and also has an English-language version. The popularity of the app, whose name translates to Little Red Book, in Chinese social media has prompted the creation of alternatives such as Lemon8, a similarly designed rival authored by ByteDance. Lemon8 downloads across iOS and Android tripled last week, according to Sensor Tower data, and it was briefly the most downloaded free iPhone app on Monday.
“The ones benefiting from traffic from the TikTok ban are still Chinese apps,” GSR Ventures managing director Allen Zhu wrote on WeChat, posting a screenshot of the US App Store download chart.
A stream of new English-language content and users showed up on Xiaohongshu this week, and the #tiktokrefugee hashtag garnered more than 25 million views.
In one popular video, a creator called on all TikTok migrants to make the move to Xiaohongshu and said she was already settling in nicely on the new app. Another used an artificial intelligence translator to record a message in Mandarin to say that “Americans support Chinese more than you think”. Other newcomers made jokes about how they will miss their “Chinese spy” when TikTok shuts in the US, eliciting sympathetic comments from Chinese users.
Together with Beijing-based ByteDance, Xiaohongshu is one of just a handful of major Chinese Internet unicorns that have yet to make a stock market debut. Backed by Alibaba Group Holding and Hongshan, the app was on track to double net profit to more than US$1 billion in 2024, Bloomberg News has reported. BLOOMBERG
