Chinese Apps Xiaohongshu and Lemon8 Jump to Top of App Store as TikTok Ban Looms

As TikTok moves closer to being kicked out of the U.S., two Chinese apps — Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, which shares parent company ByteDance with TikTok — have blitzed to the top of the Apple App Store.

As of Tuesday morning, Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote) is the top-ranked free app in the country; it’s a social media app that describes itself as a “lifestyle platform” where users can post and find product reviews, with a particular focus on health products.

Notably, the app, which uses a bright red icon, translates to “Little Red Book” in English. In China, The Little Red Book is also the name for a propaganda book that includes quotes from Mao Zedong, the longtime leader of China’s communist party.

“During China’s ‘Cultural Revolution,’ it became virtually mandatory to own and carry one,” the BBC said about The Little Red Book in 2015.

Several prominent TikTok users have been promoting Xiaohongshu on their profiles, TechCrunch reported. The app does not share a parent company with TikTok, but all Chinese companies ultimately answer to the same boss — the country’s communist government.

The second-ranked app in Apple’s App Store, meanwhile, is Lemon8. The pictures-and-video social app focuses on lifestyle content like beauty, food and travel, and is owned by ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company.

In September, TheWrap reported Lemon8 had a big summer in terms of user growth, pushing the app to 12 million total downloads in the U.S.

But several users told TheWrap they were skeptical Lemon8 would have much staying power, as its user base is comprised of almost exclusively women and it is struggling to achieve cross-app sharing amongst its competitors.

“I found it underwhelming,” one former user told TheWrap. “I wasn’t seeing too much that was new.”

ByteDance aggressively advertised Lemon8 last year, primarily on TikTok. The company started paying TikTok influencers a few hundred dollars each to post about Lemon8 — a campaign that led to pushback from many other TikTok users. Still, the app appears to have found stable footing in the U.S., at least for now, as it has raced up the App Store rankings.

TikTok is set to be banned on Jan. 19. President Joe Biden signed a law last April kicking the popular app — which has 170 million monthly American users — out of the States, unless ByteDance divests from its U.S. operations. The chief concern U.S. lawmakers say they have with TikTok is that it could double as a spyware app for the Chinese government; TikTok, per Chinese law, is required to share user data if asked to do so.

The Supreme Court is currently weighing TikTok’s plea to overturn the law banning the app, but it does not appear likely before Sunday, when the app’s ban date hits.

The post Chinese Apps Xiaohongshu and Lemon8 Jump to Top of App Store as TikTok Ban Looms appeared first on TheWrap.