In the United States, they have taken the banning of the Chinese app TikTok to Congress itself. Its parent company, ByteDance, has an ace up its sleeve called Lemon8, a new app that wants to take down Instagram in record time.
Over the past month, ByteDance has been promoting its Instagram-like app to users in the United States. Lemon8 is a video and photo sharing social network that caters to users’ interest in food, beauty, wellness and travel.
Lemon8 is not a new application, it is just new to U.S. social network users. It has been around in China for quite some time.
From irrelevant to number one in app stores
Lemon8 is an application for sharing videos and photos on social networks. It does not support vertical scrolling of videos and the content created in the app usually revolves around a specific theme.
The most popular topics in the app are fashion, beauty, food, wellness and travel. Under each topic there are tips, recommendations, “get ready with me” style videos and aesthetically pleasing, perfectly selected content.
Lemon8 fashion influencers can “tag” where they bought their clothes and how much it cost them. Lemon8 is more like Instagram in that the content created in the app is intended to influence the user to buy something that looks more like their favorite influencer.
Instagram has a reputation for “contrived spontaneity,” or the idea that a perfect moment or photo came naturally.
Viewers are now more aware that most Instagram content is edited or staged in some way, which has recently turned some users away from the app.
But those who enjoy aesthetically pleasing content can find it on Lemon8 and without having to put up with the things they don’t like about Instagram’s interface.
Right now, the app is number one in Apple’s App Store for lifestyle apps, a big jump for an app that never made it into the top 200 in the United States.
Online, specifically on TikTok, social media influencers have described the app as if “Instagram and Pinterest had a baby.” Meanwhile, the U.S. still wants to shut down TikTok.
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