Lemon8, TikTok’s Sister App, Is Growing Fast — but Will It Last?
While TikTok is on the verge of being booted from the U.S., its sister app, Lemon8, is growing rapidly. Could it fill some of the gap left by the ubiquitous short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance and help the company maintain a U.S. foothold?
Since last summer, Lemon8 has more than tripled its user base, hitting 12 million downloads in the United States, which is still less than a 10th of TikTok’s American user base. But several users told TheWrap they’re skeptical that the pictures-and-video social app — which focuses on lifestyle content like beauty, food and travel — will have much staying power as its user base is comprised of almost exclusively women and it is struggling to achieve cross-app sharing among its competitors.
“I found it underwhelming,” Jen Segbe, who tried Lemon8 earlier this year, told TheWrap. “I wasn’t seeing too much that was new.”
The 29-year-old from Atlanta said she was impressed with the creative tools offered by Lemon8, which ByteDance launched in the U.S. in February of 2023, and that she initially liked the app’s Instagram-meets-Pinterest vibe.
But what really caught her eye was that the top posts on Lemon8 were things she’d already seen on TikTok. “I found that a lot of the content that was on there was just regurgitated from TikTok, which was a little displeasing,” Segbe said.
TikTok content crossing over to Lemon8 makes sense, considering they’re both owned by ByteDance. And with ByteDance quickly approaching a January deadline to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or face being banned in the U.S., it’s easy to see why the Beijing-based technology company is pushing Lemon8 as a backup plan.
As TheWrap reported in March, should the ban take effect, TikTok competitors Meta, Alphabet and Snap Inc. stand to benefit the most. They could see a bump in engagement on their short-form video platforms and get a windfall of billions in revenue, Wall Street analysts have said.
ByteDance, meanwhile, has been more aggressive in advertising Lemon8, primarily on TikTok. Earlier this year, the company started paying TikTok influencers a few hundred dollars each to post about Lemon8. One influencer, who declined ByteDance’s advance, said she was offered $200 to upload a pro-Lemon8 video to TikTok, according to The New York Post.
Other influencers appeared to jump at the opportunity to make a little more dough. One TikToker who posts under the name “its Alysssa Stevenss” shared to her 174,000 followers earlier this year that she’d “found an app for the girlies.”
“Lemon8 is the destination for sharing and exploring … There is something for everyone on Lemon8,” she said.
That influencer blitz appeared to help boost downloads, but it could also be turning off a number of potential users who’ve taken to TikTok to complain about the surge in Lemon8 ads, some of which have gone viral.
“Stop forcing Lemon8 on us — we don’t want it,” one TikTok video with 173 likes said earlier this year. Another TikTok user racked up 270,000 likes after posting it “pisses” her off when she sees an interesting video, only for it to turn out to be an ad for Lemon8.
The same goes for many of those who have tried Lemon8. They helped it crack the top 10 most-downloaded apps on Apple and Google’s app stores, but their experience has made them skeptical that Lemon8’s 2024 success is much more than a sugar high.
And it remains unclear whether Lemon8 will satisfy concerns members of Congress expressed about TikTok’s potential use by the Chinese government to pilfer personal data from its American users.
ByteDance is obligated by multiple Chinese laws to share user information if the government asks for it. In 2023, TikTok’s CEO testified before Congress that American users had their data stored safely in the U.S. — a claim the company walked back months later after Forbes reported the “sensitive financial data” of some of TikTok’s biggest U.S. creators had been stored in China and was accessible by ByteDance employees. Lemon8, meanwhile, hasn’t said anything about protecting American user data from China’s government, and the company did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Rapid growth
So far, Lemon8 has been on a rapid growth trajectory: Between the start of June and the end of August, Lemon8’s U.S. downloads increased 340% when compared to summer 2023, according to data shared by market research company Sensor Tower. TikTok, by comparison, grew 20% year-over-year during that same time frame, while both Reddit and Instagram grew 13% year-over-year, per Sensor Tower. (Reddit has about 36 million daily users in the States, while Instagram has 166 million U.S. users.) Of course, those are much bigger apps — TikTok has 170 million monthly users in the U.S. — so they’re not going to quadruple in size the way Lemon8 did.
Globally, the user base is less impressive. Lemon8 had just under 1 million downloads in June. That month was its best month in terms of year-over-year growth in the U.S., with Lemon8’s downloads increasing 503% from the prior June, according to Sensor Tower.
That growth may not translate to long-term success, however. Downloads are great for any app, but having a large, engaged user base is paramount. That means users are spending time on your app — and not on your competitors’ — day in, day out.
TikTok-Lemon8 content mingling speaks to what Lauren Brown, another ex-Lemon8 user, called the app’s “inauthentic” feeling. The 42-year-old from Baltimore told TheWrap the app “is beautiful,” but lacks much life.
“It’s hard to form a community on Lemon8,” she said.
Both Brown and Segbe also noted the app was dominated by women — to the point where it’s mildly shocking to see a man’s profile. Their experience matches the data: 94% of Lemon8’s U.S. downloads this summer were by women, according to Sensor Tower.
And while she enjoyed scrolling fitness and lifestyle posts, Brown said she “got burned out” on creating content for the app. Ultimately, she decided to ditch Lemon8 after using it for about a month, which is the same amount of time Segbe said she used the app before deleting it.
Will Lemon8 have any staying power? There are a few other factors to consider. First, the app is self-contained. Lemon8 content is rarely posted on X or other social platforms. That lack of cross-pollination is glaring when compared to content from X, Instagram and TikTok, which routinely jumps from platform to platform.
By comparison, Lemon8 appears niche — and it will likely stay that way unless it gets more traction outside its own app.
“I personally don’t think the platform is sustainable,” Segbe said, “and I don’t expect it to be around or relevant for long.”
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