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ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok is back on US mobile stores and the app that seemed poised to take its place has suffered a precipitous drop in interest.
In the five days following TikTok’s re-listing on Apple Inc.’s iPhone app store and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Play, downloads of social app Xiaohongshu plummeted by 91 percent, according to Sensor Tower data. Also known as Rednote, the social app is commonly referred to as China’s version of Instagram and boomed in popularity when TikTok’s potential US ban approached. Daily active users on Rednote are still about a quarter higher than they were prior to TikTok’s delisting, Sensor Tower said.
TikTok itself more than doubled its usual downloads once it was brought back, while all competitors that had gained from its brief removal saw declines, from YouTube and Snap to Facebook and Instagram. The absence was not without a cost for ByteDance, however, as Appfigures estimates the company missed out on around $142 million in US consumer spending in the app during the time it was gone from Apple and Google’s storefronts.
The fate of TikTok in the US remains in the balance, as President Donald Trump has granted only a 75-day extension — until early April — to the deadline for ByteDance to find a buyer for its US operations or face a ban. To date, the company has rejected the idea of selling, while bidders have emerged, from Perplexity AI to former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. Trump has indicated he’s keen to strike a deal that serves US interests.
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Gross consumer spending on TikTok in the US now averages approximately $4.7 million per day, slightly lower than the rate before its removal, Appfigures said. The app’s influence extends far beyond its 170 million users in the country, as rivals from YouTube to Instagram have reconfigured their interfaces and pushed short-video content to better compete with TikTok’s popularity.
By Vlad Savov
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