Just this month, TikTok released a brand-new social app called Whee. It’s like Instagram and lets you take pictures to share with your friends. Whee lets you use picture filters and send messages, just like Instagram. But it’s not clear what the company has planned for Whee because the app hasn’t been promoted on Apple’s Search Ads yet and doesn’t have many users, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.
Without help with promotion, new apps on the App Store today aren’t seen by many people. That also seems to be the case for Whee, which quietly came out on June 18 in 71 countries around the world. Because it wasn’t promoted enough, Whee didn’t make it into the Top Free Apps chart on Apple’s App Store. It also didn’t become one of the Top 500 Social apps in its approved markets right away, but that changed over time.
It is linked to TikTok and is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. However, Whee was made by TikTok and not its parent company, as shown in its App Store description.
Google Play data shows that as of Tuesday, Whee had only gotten 13,000 downloads around the world on iOS and just over 10,000 downloads on Android. Also, it’s clear that it’s not being pushed in the U.S. right now, since Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Peru, and Indonesia are its top iOS countries. Even so, those countries only send a small number of downloads.
For example, Malaysia, which was the number one market, got 2,400 downloads, while Indonesia, which was in fifth place, only got 800 copies. Since the number of downloads is so low, it’s possible that these are from people who found Whee by accident while searching the App Store. Around the world, Whee made it into the Top 500 Social apps, but never as high as the Top 10 and usually much further down the list, well past 50.
Appfigures also says that ByteDance hasn’t tried to promote Whee through Apple’s look Ads yet, which help apps rank high when people use certain keywords to look for apps in the App Store. The company found that Whee hasn’t been linked to any Apple Search Ads behavior yet. Not only that, but the comments from people who have used Whee is also pretty neutral. The app has an overall rating of 3.6 out of 5 in the App Store, with only 10 reviews.
ByteDance hasn’t said anything about its plans for Whee, but the date of the app’s release has caused some discussion. In late April, President Biden signed the TikTok ban into law after the House passed a revised bill that required either a sale or a ban on TikTok. (Since then, TikTok has sued the U.S. to stop the law from going into effect. This will at least keep the ban from going into effect for a while while the courts review the law.)
When Whee comes to the U.S., it could be a kind of backup plan that lets ByteDance keep a social presence there even if TikTok’s ban is confirmed.
It’s not the first time that ByteDance has tried to get people interested in social apps besides TikTok. In early 2023, the company secretly released Lemon8, an app that works like Instagram, in the U.S. and U.K. They even paid TikTok influencers to post about the app to help spread the word about it. Those efforts didn’t pay off right away. By November 2023, only 2.5 million people in the U.S. had downloaded the app on iOS. That’s a lot for a new company, but not even close to TikTok, which has over a billion daily active users, including 170 million in the U.S. But Lemon8 might be a slow-burning attempt to grow. We now have almost 7.7 million iOS users, making it the No. 2 Lifestyle game in the U.S.
CapCut is another popular video app run by ByteDance that is often used to make TikTok movies. And for a short time, it had a rival called TikTok Now, but that shut down after less than a year. At the moment, it’s trying TikTok Notes, a service that competes with Instagram.
Also Read: Tiktok’s Rival to Instagram is Expected to Be Called Tiktok Notes
It’s still not clear if Whee will use the same strategy as Lemon8. If, however, your favorite TikTok celebrity starts talking about Whee for no reason at some point in the future, know that they were likely paid to do so.
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