TikTok ban backup plan? ByteDance-owned Instagram rival Lemon8 hits the US App Store's Top 10

As U.S. lawmakers move forward with their plans for a TikTok ban or forced sale, the app's Chinese parent company ByteDance is driving another of its social platforms into the Top Charts of the U.S. App Store. ByteDance-owned app Lemon8, an Instagram rival that describes itself as a "lifestyle community," jumped into the U.S. App Store's Top Charts on Monday, becoming the No. 10 Overall app, across both apps and games. Today, it's ranked No. 9 on the App Store's Top Apps chart, excluding games.

This is a dramatic move for the little-known app and one that points to paid user acquisition efforts powering this surge. Prior to yesterday, the Lemon8 app had never before ranked in the Top 200 Overall Charts in the U.S., according to app store intelligence provided to TechCrunch by data.ai.

The firm confirms that such a fast move from being an unranked app to being No. 9 among the top free apps in the U.S. -- ahead of YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook -- implies a "significant" and "recent" user acquisition push on the app publisher's part. Unfortunately, because the app is so new to the App Store's Top Charts, third-party app analytics firms don't yet have precise data on Lemon8's U.S. installs, or how those installs have recently changed over the past few days.

But given the app was launched globally back in March 2020, what's most likely is that it was quietly released on the U.S. App Store, but only for testing purposes. Then, sometime over the past few days it was more "officially" launched, meaning it was accompanied by this clearly sizable spend on paid discovery or app install ads.

Image Credits: Lemon8

According to app intelligence provider Apptopia's data, Lemon8 debuted on both iOS and Android in March 2020 and has since gained 16 million global downloads, with Japan as its top market, accounting for 38% of its total installs. While the firm also doesn't have a figure for its U.S. installs, it was able to estimate the app currently has 4.25 million monthly active users.

Apptopia noted it didn't yet see Lemon8 having spent on paid search on either the App Store or Google Play, but cautioned it may have paid install campaigns that just haven't populated in its system yet or spend that's on networks it doesn't have insight into.

However, we believe ByteDance might simply be leveraging one of its own channels to drive app installs: TikTok.

Over on TikTok, we noticed a number of creators recently began posting about Lemon8, with many new videos appearing in just the past 24 hours. Concerningly, many of their reviews are extremely positive but are not marked as sponsored content.