TikTok Alternative’s Popularity Plummets for This Reason
By Movieguide® Contributor
Rednote was poised to replace TikTok when a possible ban loomed, but its popularity has since plummeted.
Bloomberg reported that just five days after TikTok’s return to app stores, Rednote downloads dropped by 91%.
Ahead of the potential TikTok ban in January, American users flooded to the alternative Chinese app, boosting its numbers from 300,000 active users in the U.S. to 3 million in just a week. But when President Donald Trump signed an executive order that didn’t overturn the ban but rather told “the US attorney general not to enforce the law for now,” according to the BBC, Americans’ access returned.
A few weeks later, AG Pam Bondi told Apple and Google that the Trump administration wouldn’t fine them for supporting the app, and TikTok reappeared in the companies’ app stores.
Since then, TikTok’s downloads have more than doubled, Bloomberg said, while competitors like YouTube, Snap, Facebook and Instagram saw declines.
Rednote’s daily active users are still about a quarter higher than before TikTok was taken down, but it’s boom in popularity doesn’t seem like it will stick, which is probably a good thing for Americans’ security.
“RedNote was never meant for outside of the China market. All of the data sharing and all the servers to which the data is being shared is in China,” Adrianus Warmenhoven, a cybersecurity expert at Nord VPN, told CBS News. “It means they are exempt from all of these data protections and outside of the view of the American government.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott moved to ban the app, along with Chinese AI platform DeepSeek, from government devices.
“Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps,” he said after the ban was announced. “To achieve that mission, I ordered Texas state agencies to ban Chinese government-based AI and social media apps from all state issued devices.”
READ MORE: TEXAS GOVERNOR BANS THESE CHINESE-OWNED APPS ON GOVERNMENT DEVICES
Although TikTok is back for now, its future still seems uncertain. President Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to sell the app by 75 days, but the company hasn’t signaled what its next move will be.
Americans’ support of the app’s ban has declined as well, falling from 38% in favor of it last fall to 32%.
READ MORE: WHAT INVESTOR GROUPS AND MAJOR COMPANIES ARE COMPETING TO BUY TIKTOK?
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