A pair of Chinese-made social apps, Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, have surged to the top two positions on Apple Inc’s iPhone download charts in the US as users seek alternatives to TikTok ahead of an imminent ban.
ByteDance Ltd’s TikTok faces a deadline of January 19 to find a US buyer to continue operating in the country. The Supreme Court has signaled it’s unlikely to oppose the law imposing that condition.
Xiaohongshu, known as Little Red Book, is China’s closest analog 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 Inc’s Google Play store for the first time.
Many new users have labeled themselves as “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 Xiaohongshu 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 January 13.
“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 AI translator to record a message in Mandarin to say that “Americans support Chinese more than you think.” Other newcomers made jokes about how they’ll miss their “Chinese spy” when TikTok shuts down 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 Ltd and Hongshan, the app was on track to double net profit to more than US$1 billion (S$1.37 billion) in 2024, Bloomberg News has reported.