The archive · Consumer Apps · Marketing decision · 2020–2025
Lemon8: ByteDance's TikTok-ban backup tops US charts three times, never sticks
ByteDance bet a US TikTok ban would refill photo app Lemon8, buying chart surges (No.9 2023, No.10 2024) that faded — and the backup got banned in Jan 2025.
Lemon8 (ByteDance)
What the business is
Aesthetic photo-and-lifestyle feed app (Pinterest-meets-Instagram) from ByteDance; launched in Japan in 2020, expanded to Southeast Asia and the US.
How it started
Lemon8 launched globally in March 2020 as a 'lifestyle community' in Japan, reaching monthly download peaks of 292k (Jul 2021) and 1.5M (Jul 2022) — about 10.6M total for 2022 — still invisible in the US. As Congress began weighing action on TikTok in early 2023, ByteDance soft-launched the US market and was already paying TikTok creators to seed Lemon8 posts (Insider, Feb 2023) before most Americans had heard of the app.
What happened
Mar 2023: a one-day jump to No.9 US Top Apps — previously never ranked Top 200 (data.ai) — with 350+ promotional TikTok videos in 24h and the #Lemon8 hashtag at 2.3B views. Then it faded: Appfigures counted only 2.6M total US installs by Nov 2023, 'spikes, not a rising trend', No.2 in Lifestyle but No.90 Overall. Sep 2024: No.10 again as the ban headed to court, pushed by a 'massive' 5,300-keyword Apple Search Ads campaign targeting TikTok, CapCut, Instagram and Canva plus TikTok For-You ads; 78k downloads in one Saturday (~44% above average) and 16M global downloads for 2024, 6.4M from the US. Nov 2024: TikTok unified logins so creators could cross-post onto Lemon8.
How it ended up
When the ban finally took effect on Jan 19, 2025, Apple pulled Lemon8 from the US App Store together with TikTok, CapCut and Gauth. After enforcement was paused and the apps restored, ByteDance retired TikTok Notes — its other Instagram rival — into Lemon8 (May 2025); Lemon8 had ~12.5M global monthly active users as of Dec 2024 (Fortune). Between ban scares, every US surge reverted to baseline.
Background
Lemon8 launched in March 2020 as a 'lifestyle community' in Japan — an aesthetic feed of outfit slideshows, recipes and travel notes that ByteDance hoped would be its Pinterest-meets-Instagram. By 2022 it had ~10.6M downloads that year, mostly in Japan and Southeast Asia, still invisible in the US. When US lawmakers took up a TikTok ban in early 2023, ByteDance saw its opening: a sister app already stocked with aesthetic content could be the refuge for a banned TikTok audience — and reports emerged that it was paying TikTok creators to post (Insider, Feb 2023).
The first push worked like clockwork. On March 28, 2023, with the ban in headlines, Lemon8 jumped overnight from never ranking in the US Top 200 to No.10 Overall and No.9 among free apps (data.ai), with 350+ promo TikTok videos in 24h. The surge did not compound: Appfigures counted only 2.6M US downloads by Nov 2023 ('spikes, not a rising trend'): No.2 Lifestyle, No.90 Overall. It repeated in September 2024 as the ban headed to court — No.10 again, on 5,300 Apple Search Ads keywords and 78,000 downloads in one Saturday; logins unified in Nov 2024 so creators could port accounts over.
When the ban finally came, it took the backup with it: on January 19, 2025 Apple removed Lemon8 from the US App Store alongside TikTok, CapCut and Gauth — the law reached every ByteDance app, not just TikTok. Both returned after the enforcement pause, and ByteDance kept promoting Lemon8, folding TikTok Notes into it in May 2025, when Lemon8 had ~12.5M global monthly users (Dec 2024, per Fortune). Five years in, Lemon8 remains the designated contingency, but each US surge between ban scares reverts to baseline: paid acquisition could rent chart positions, never a durable audience.
What has to be true
- Paid seeding buys installs, not habit: Appfigures showed most US downloads were spikes tied to ban news — only 2.6M total after a year — and users had no reason to stay once TikTok survived.
- The hedge was correlated with the risk it hedged: the TikTok-login hook and in-feed promotion worked only while TikTok ran in the US, and the Jan 2025 ban removed both apps at once.
- Undisclosed paid promotion hurt the organic story: creators repeated 'Pinterest meets Instagram' scripts without disclosure — it rented one spike but made word-of-mouth claims look engineered.
- Lemon8 added no US-specific hook: it duplicated the aesthetics Pinterest and Instagram already served with real networks, so there was nothing to return to after each ban scare passed.
What can be applied
Ban-backup bets rent attention only while the crisis runs: Lemon8's paid surges faded each time the threat passed, and when the ban landed, the backup was banned too.
Aftermath
As of September 2026 Lemon8 remains on the App Store as ByteDance's photo-app flagship, tied to TikTok accounts and repeatedly promoted inside TikTok whenever a new US deadline loomed. Each ban cycle — March 2023, September 2024, January 2025 — produced a chart spike followed by a fade; after the January 2025 removal and reinstatement, TikTok Notes was shut down (May 2025) with its users steered to Lemon8, making it the last surviving ByteDance Instagram rival. Its reported ~12.5M monthly active users (Dec 2024) sit far below the 150M+ US users TikTok had in March 2023 (Axios, via TechCrunch).
Sources
- TikTok ban backup plan? ByteDance-owned Instagram rival Lemon8 hits the US App Store's Top 10
- Lemon8, the Instagram rival from TikTok parent ByteDance, fails to gain traction in US
- As TikTok ban heads to court, ByteDance's Lemon8 surges
- Apple lists all apps it removed alongside TikTok in the US
- TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes
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