Could TikTok’s sister app, Lemon8, offer a lifeline for ByteDance and creators?

Tomorrow marks one of the biggest days in recent history for ByteDance, and for the most screen-addicted Americans in your life, as representatives from the Chinese tech giant make last-ditch appeals to the Supreme Court to try to divert the US ban on the company’s flagship app, TikTok.

As things stand, a bipartisan bill signed off by Joe Biden last April means that the short-form social-media behemoth would be outlawed in the US on January 19 (next Sunday), unless ByteDance sells the platform to an American company, or the Supreme Court intervenes, or President-elect Donald Trump intervenes, or some as yet unknown outcome saves the app, which reportedly counts more than 170 million users in the US. 

While a ban wouldn’t automatically wipe TikTok from those 170 million Americans’ devices before they could say the word “rizzler,” new users wouldn’t be able to download it, and a ban on updates would eventually make the platform practically unusable.

Public support for the ban, proposed due to safety concerns around sensitive user data, has been dwindling, with millions of Americans already looking to another ByteDance app as an alternative if the ban goes through.

According to data from site-traffic tracker Similarweb, more than 2.3 million unique visitors clocked just over 5 million page views on the landing page for Lemon8 in America last month. That number has grown as TikTok creators — some of whom are being paid to do so by ByteDance — push users to the photo- and video-sharing “lifestyle community” TikTok alternative, per Axios.

Though Lemon8, which launched in the US in early 2023 but didn’t take off in the same way as TikTok, might not be the safest port in this particular storm. Indeed, the divest-or-ban part of the bill reportedly applies to other properties owned or operated by ByteDance, meaning that even the replacement app’s future could be in peril.