TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, on May 8. The photo-sharing app launched in testing in Canada, Australia, and Vietnam final yr.
The firm is notifying TikTok Notes customers of its resolution to retire the app and is directing them to ByteDance-owned Lemon8, which isn’t shocking provided that the apps are fairly related and supply the identical kind of performance.
“We’re excited to deliver the suggestions from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we proceed constructing a devoted area for our neighborhood to share and expertise photograph content material, designed to enhance and improve the TikTok expertise,” a TikTok spokesperson mentioned in an announcement to TechCrunch.
While TikTok didn’t present a selected purpose for shutting down the app, it’s possible that the corporate didn’t see a lot adoption for TikTok Notes and is deciding to as a substitute push Lemon8, which had round 12.5 million international month-to-month lively customers as of December 2024.
In a discover to TikTok Notes customers, TikTok says the choice to close down the app “was not made frivolously.” The discover encourages customers to obtain and save their TikTok Notes knowledge and “proceed sharing your creativity on Lemon8.” TikTok says that “Lemon8 is a life-style app that provides an analogous expertise to TikTok Notes” however with “much more options.”
Lemon8 launched in Japan in 2020 and later expanded to markets throughout the U.S. and Southeast Asia. The app is much like Instagram and Pinterest, because it lets customers share slideshows and photograph collections and browse content material by “Following” and “For You” feeds. Lemon8 gives customers entry to inventive instruments, filters, results, stickers, textual content templates, and extra.
While TikTok is pushing Lemon8 as an alternative choice to TikTok Notes, ByteDance has additionally tried to place the app as an alternative choice to TikTok itself within the face of a possible U.S. ban.
Last November, the corporate made it doable for customers to immediately entry Lemon8 with their TikTok accounts and rolled out the flexibility for customers to cross-share photograph content material between the apps. The transfer was seen as a approach for ByteDance to maneuver creators onto the brand new platform with out having to get them to enroll in it individually in case TikTok had been to go away.
Fast-forward to right now, and TikTok continues to advertise Lemon8 in its app because it faces a brand new ban deadline of April 5.
