At the beginning of this month, TikTok launched a new social app called Whee, designed for sharing photos and communicating with friends similarly to Instagram. The app allows the use of photo filters and includes a messaging feature, but the company’s plans for this application are rather uncertain after a pretty slow start with relatively few downloads and no visible promotion through Apple’s search ads, according to data from Appfigures echoed by TechCrunch.
Since its launch on June 18th, Whee has remained largely invisible in the App Store due to a lack of marketing actions. The app has not managed to enter the list of top free apps on Apple or the top 500 social apps in the markets where it’s available, although this has started to change slightly. Until Tuesday, Whee recorded only 13,000 global downloads on iOS and about 10,000 on Android, according to Google Play data.
For now, Whee’s main market on iOS is Malaysia, with 2,400 downloads, followed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Peru, and Indonesia, with figures ranging from 800 to 1,200 downloads per country. These figures indicate that the downloads probably come from people who stumbled upon Whee by chance. Since social apps belong to a smaller market with fewer apps, Whee has managed to enter the Top 500 of social apps, although it has never reached the Top 10.
Appfigures also notes that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has not yet advertised Whee through Apple’s search ads, a strategy that could improve the app’s visibility. Furthermore, user reviews from those who have found Whee are mixed, averaging an overall rating of 3.6 out of 5 based on 31 reviews, of which only 10 have written reviews.
The arrival of Whee could be a strategy by ByteDance to maintain its presence in the United States in the face of the possible ban of TikTok in the country, something similar to what it tried with Lemon8, another of the company’s social apps that didn’t work. Will it be a new case of “here today, gone tomorrow”?