What is Lemon8 and what does it have to do with TikTok

According to CEO Shou Zi Chew's testimony in front of the Congress, TikTok is not out of the woods yet, quite the opposite. 150 million US users are in danger of leaving the platform, and that is perhaps why parent company ByteDance Ltd. has already prepared a replacement. Lemon8 is a content-sharing platform that allows users to write longer posts on topics such as fashion, fitness, travel and cooking, accompanied by relevant images and videos, creating a feed that is more like a mix of Instagram and Pinterest than TikTok's short videos. Recently, downloads have increased dramatically on American soil: Lemon8 has overtaken Pinterest, Tinder and real estate platform Zillow to become the first lifestyle app downloaded from the iPhone. This success is due in part to the direct push by ByteDance, which is investing in promotion on English-speaking soil and paying developers to publish on the platform. Of course, only time will tell if the Chinese platform will be able to replicate TikTok's success, but what is certain is that the app's unclear origin story could soon anger the US government.

As BOF notes, information about the app is unclear: although regulatory documents and media reports indicate that Lemon8 is owned by ByteDance, Apple's App Shop lists Singapore-based Heliophilia Pte as the owner of the platform. The Singapore company registry shows that Heliophilia has the same address as TikTok's local office and lists a Zhou Qin as a director. Last year, Reuters reported that the app is overseen by Alex Zhu, ByteDance's senior vice president of product and strategy and former CEO of TikTok. Despite its links to TikTok, Lemon8 is more akin to Xiaohongshu, the Chinese app that was founded under the name RED (literally Little Red Book, an unmistakable reference to Mao Zedong for some) in 2013 as an online community that recommended foreign e-commerce websites to users in China, and has since evolved into a social media platform where users share their everyday moments through videos and images on a variety of topics. Lemon8 is popular among young women and was launched in Japan in April 2020. According to the New York Times, Lemon8 reached five million monthly active users worldwide last year.

Lemon8 could face the same prejudice as TikTok, which has been banned from government devices around the world due to national security concerns, because of its links to ByteDance. While the existence of TikTok on US soil remains uncertain after years in which exclusion or banning was a daily threat, just like the future of Chinese platforms in the US itself is difficult to predict.