As TikTok heads to court on Monday to argue against a U.S. ban, parent company ByteDance’s newer social app, Lemon8, is once again surging to the top of the App Store in the U.S. The push is due, in part, to increased advertising. Described by TikTok influencers as a cross between Pinterest and Instagram — or more recently, as “Pinterest on steroids” — the app had previously appeared in the App Store’s top charts when a TikTok ban was being discussed by U.S. lawmakers.
Seemingly poised to serve as a backup plan if TikTok were to be removed from the U.S. market — or divested from its Chinese parent company — Lemon8 offers TikTok creators a new platform they could port their followers to in the event of a ban.
The app launched globally in 2020, but U.S. ad spend and influencer marketing began until last year.
To achieve its latest ranking as the No. 10 app in the U.S. App Store as of earlier on Monday morning, ByteDance has again invested in App Store advertising. According to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, Lemon8’s Beijing-based parent company over the past few weeks has been running a “massive” Apple Search Ads campaign that saw the use of 5,300 keywords just in the past week alone. This campaign targeted branded keywords like TikTok, CapCut, Instagram, Canva, and others that have the biggest share of advertiser impressions, the firm noted.
The company has also been running ads for Lemon8 that appear in the “For You” feed on TikTok, driving users’ curiosity. Plus, TikTok creators are once again discussing the app on their own profiles. Many of those posts do not disclose if the influencer is being paid to promote the app, though they often use similar language to last year’s campaign, including comparisons between Lemon8 and other social apps, like Instagram and Pinterest. One video from August shows a creator unboxing a PR package containing Lemon8 mascot plushies.
Appfigures’ data indicates that the app has been on the rise for a few weeks, thanks to the ads, but the latest jump is more recent.
Lemon8 received 78,000 estimated downloads on Saturday, which is roughly 44% higher than its average over the last few weeks, for instance. In total, the app has seen 16 million global downloads this year, with a little under half (6.4 million) of those coming from the U.S., demonstrating the U.S. remains a key market for the advertising push.
Downloads in other markets, like the Philippines and Singapore, are now on the decline, which could suggest ByteDance is moving ad spend around to target different regions outside the U.S.
Lemon8’s growth comes as arguments around TikTok’s future in the U.S. head into court on Monday where ByteDance will fight against a ban, arguing that the law violates Americans’ right to free speech. The law, signed in April, was temporarily blocked from going into effect by a lawsuit filed by ByteDance and TikTok in May. In addition, the company will argue that the timeframe to divest the company in the case of a sale is too short since ByteDance doesn’t intend to sell its recommendation technology as part of any sale to a U.S. entity.
The Department of Justice, meanwhile, will argue that TikTok’s control by a Chinese-owned company could give Beijing access to U.S. users’ personal information in addition to being able to use the app to influence public opinion.
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I have a guilty pleasure, and it’s not that I just rewatched “Glee” in its entirety (yes, even the awful later seasons), or that I have read an ungodly amount of Harry Potter fan fiction in my time.
My guilty pleasure is that I play the LinkedIn games.
To answer the obvious question: Wait, LinkedIn has games? Yes. In May, LinkedIn launched three puzzles through LinkedIn News, like a knock-off version of New York Times games. There’s the logic puzzle Queens (my favorite), the word game Crossclimb (pretty good), and the word-association game Pinpoint (not a great game, but whatever).
LinkedIn is adopting the classic tech strategy of seeing what works for another company and then trying to replicate that success, even if it might seem odd to play games on a professional networking platform. But it’s no wonder why NYT Games has spurred this inspiration. In a way, The New York Times is a gaming company now — as of December 2023, users spent more time on the NYT Games app than on its news app.
LinkedIn isn’t alone. Everyone has games now. Apple News. Netflix. YouTube. There are so many games for us to indulge in. And yet, once I finish my various New York Times puzzles, I still want more. It’s not like I’m itching to play LinkedIn’s Crossclimb before Connections, but the games are good enough to give me that sweet rush of dopamine.
Usually I play LinkedIn’s games during the workday (sorry to my boss). Sometimes it’s because I’ve gone on LinkedIn to fact-check something or search for a source, but then I remember I can take a few minutes to play a little game. Other times, my mind is scrambled after staring too long at the same draft of an article, and taking a break to solve a colorful Queens puzzle makes it easier to go back and confront that Google Doc again.
But it turns out that there’s a science to why we love these quick, once-a-day brain teasers.
I recently spoke with DeepWell DTx co-founder Ryan Douglas, whose company is predicated on the idea that playing video games (in moderation) can have mental health benefits. In some cases, the brief distraction of a game can pull us out of negative thought spirals or help us approach a problem from a new perspective.
“If you’re playing Tetris, for instance, you can’t have a big conversation in your head about how terrible you are, and how you suck, and what’s going to go on next week, and all that,” Douglas told TechCrunch.
On a neuroscientific level, Douglas explained that when we play games, we activate the limbic system in our brains, which is responsible for navigating stress. But even if these stressors are simulated, they get our brains accustomed to overcoming that stress in a variety of ways.
“You start learning on a subconscious level, creating new neural pathways at an accelerated rate, and choosing them preferentially on a subconscious level for how you’re going to deal with these issues in the future,” he said. “If you cope with [a stressor] in this particular environment, you’ve gained agency. You have control.”
This isn’t to say we should all go and play Pokémon all day — the video game developer tools that DeepWell makes are approved for therapeutic use in 15-minute doses. Maybe that’s why we’ve all become so enamored with games like Wordle, as well as other games from The New York Times (and LinkedIn), which have a finite ending. You do your one puzzle per day and then you move on.
Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, spoke to TechCrunch about his viral success, back before his game was acquired by The New York Times.
“I’m kind of suspicious of apps and games that want your endless attention — like, I worked in Silicon Valley. I know why they do that,” Wardle said. “I think people have an appetite for things that transparently don’t want anything from you.”
Wardle is right, though — of course, my beloved LinkedIn games do want something from me: my attention. And if I’m being honest, I’ve spent way more time on LinkedIn in recent months than I ever have.
According to LinkedIn’s own data, my behavior is not an anomaly. The company said that since the start of July, new player engagement has grown about 20% week over week. LinkedIn has also noticed strong traction in users starting conversations after playing games. When you complete a game, you can see which of your connections have also played, which I guess some people take as an opportunity to #network. I don’t do that, but then again, most of my conversations on LinkedIn are just me messaging my friends “hi,” because for some reason that’s funny to me.
So, get on LinkedIn and play your heart out … and then about four minutes later, get back to the relentless grind of global capitalism.
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OpenAI this week unveiled a preview of OpenAI o1, also known as Strawberry. The company claims that o1 can more effectively reason through math and science, as well as fact-check itself by spending more time considering all parts of a query. The family of models is available in ChatGPT and via OpenAI’s API, though OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all free users of ChatGPT at some point in the future.
Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event was this week, featuring the reveal of its iPhone 16 lineup. The phones have a new dedicated camera control feature, an A18 chip, and, of course, AI integration with Apple Intelligence. Apple also highlighted new features in its AirPods Pro 2, including the ability to use them as clinical-grade hearing aids. If you missed the event live, we put together a rundown of everything you need to know.
Oprah Winfrey hosted an AI special featuring interviews with Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and FBI director Christopher Wray. While Altman may have overpromised what AI is capable of or how it can impact the world, the dominant tone of the conversations was one of skepticism — and wariness.
This is TechCrunch’s Week in Review, where we recap the week’s biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Face-to-face with Figure 02: TechCrunch’s Brian Heater got some one-on-one time with Figure’s latest humanoid robot. It’s come a long way in a short amount of time, with a new look and the ability to walk. Read more
Pour one out for Cohost: Cohost is shutting down after running out of money. The attempted X competitor differentiated itself by focusing on a chronological feed and pursuing a business model that didn’t rely on advertising. Read more
It’s too late to opt out of Meta’s AI training: Meta has acknowledged that it uses public posts to train its AI models, but it became clear this week just how much it uses. So if your Facebook or Instagram profiles were ever public, your posts have likely been scraped. Read more
Hail a robotaxi with Uber: Uber users in Austin and Atlanta will be able to hail Waymo robotaxis through the app in early 2025 as part of an expanded partnership between the two companies. Read more
Bluesky pivots to video: Bluesky will now let users share videos of up to 60 seconds in length on its platform, allowing the social network to better compete with rivals X and Instagram’s Threads. Read more
Seattle’s hottest tourist destination is a damaged Cybertruck: A damaged Cybertruck on a busy Seattle street became an unlikely destination, and even had a makeshift memorial in front of its front bumper. The truck has since been removed, however. Read more
Robots can learn how to tie shoelaces, too: In a new paper, Google DeepMind researchers showcase a method for teaching robots to perform a range of dexterous tasks, including tying a shoe, hanging a shirt, and even fixing fellow robots. Read more
Is OpenAI worth $150B? OpenAI is reportedly in talks with investors to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion pre-money valuation. It’s significantly higher than OpenAI’s previously reported valuation of $86 billion and far higher than any other AI startup today. Read more
More trouble for Adam Neumann: The former WeWork CEO’s climate/crypto/carbon-credit startup Flowcarbon appears to be in the process of curling up to die as it reportedly refunds investors. Read more
AI hits the VMAs red carpet: Want to dress like Chappell Roan’s take on Joan of Arc? Thanks to a partnership between MTV and Shopsense AI, users can find and purchase dupes of their favorite outfits from this year’s VMAs with just a photo. Read more
Apple punts on AI: Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event featured a lot of AI talk, which is to be expected. But as Devin Coldewey writes, none of the Apple Intelligence features the company highlighted feel new or interesting — nor do they appear to include any meaningful changes since they were released in beta after WWDC. It raises the question, Is it a failure of imagination or of technology? Read more
Maybe you should stop picking up the phone: For as long as we’ve had telephones, there have been people trying to trick someone into thinking they’re someone else — and voice AI tools are making it even easier for scammers to trick people on the phone. Zack Whittaker suggests that the best way to keep yourself safe from phone-related scams might be to just let an unknown call go to voicemail. Read more
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If you’re wondering if your Facebook and Instagram posts have been used to train AI models at parent company Meta, the answer is almost certainly yes.
That’s probably not a huge surprise. Meta already announced that it’s using user content and data to train AI — but this week, its global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh acknowledged just how much of that content was actually used.
The topic came up at an inquiry with Australian lawmakers, where Greens Senator David Shoebridge said, “Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?
To which Claybaugh answered: “Correct.”
On today’s TechCrunch Minute, we discuss what’s been scraped, what’s been excluded, and how that differs depending on where you live.
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Telegram has had a tough few weeks lately. The messaging app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in late August and later released on a €5 million bail in France, charged with running a company complicit in distributing child sexual abuse material, and facilitating drug trafficking and organized fraud. Predictably, that crashed the price of the network’s cryptocurrency, Toncoin, by a third.
But last Wednesday, in the ritzy Dosan-daero part of Seoul, you could see no signs of gloom in the long line of people waiting to get into a party hosted by TON, the blockchain that runs on Telegram. Indeed, the crowd of developers, marketers, investors and other players from the blockchain ecosystem was in mood to celebrate: A few hours earlier, TON had announced at Korea Blockchain Week that transactions on the blockchain had crossed the 1 billion mark.
Unexpectedly, Durov’s high-profile arrest has proved to be something of a boon for Telegram. Downloads of the app spiked soon after the arrest, and it seems to have improved metrics on TON as well.
“Last week, TON hit all-time highs for active users and number of transactions during what, let’s be honest, is probably one of the worst weeks ever in news for TON,” Jack Booth, co-founder of TON Society, which manages the TON community, said during a conference at Korea Blockchain Week.
In theory, Durov’s status shouldn’t have a material impact on TON. Telegram and TON Foundation, which develops the blockchain, claim to be two independent entities. But things are more complicated in reality.
Durov started TON with his brother Nikolai Durov under Telegram, but the messaging app had to abandon the blockchain after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Telegram for conducting a massive unregistered initial coin offering. The app has since tried to distance itself from TON — at least by separating its corporate structure.
Meanwhile, a group of open-source developers and blockchain enthusiasts founded The Open Network Foundation, or TON Foundation, to continue developing the blockchain. Since then, TON has spawned several entities to support its fast-growing operations, including TON Society and The Open Platform, or TOP, which created the TON-based crypto wallet that runs on Telegram.
And to address concerns that the app’s disproportionate holding of Toncoin could compromise the decentralized nature of the network, Durov in February announced plans to “limit Telegram’s share of TON at ≈10% of the supply.”
Still, the fact that people panic-sold Toincoin speaks to the perception that TON and Telegram are closely related and somewhat interdependent. A person who identified himself as Minho told me at Korea Blockchain Week that he bought more TON since Durov’s arrest in the hopes that “prices will rebound following his release.”
Operationally, Telegram’s ambition of becoming a super-app like WeChat also depends heavily on the success of TON. To attract third-party developers, Telegram needs not only a proper tech stack, it requires a solid payments network to support in-app commerce, too. Only, instead of using a system that fiat system, it chooses cryptocurrency.
“When you’re tying your ecosystem to the success of the Telegram platform, then obviously when that comes into question, people start to doubt what could happen,” Booth told me. Still, he stressed that TON being a blockchain network gives it a level of independence that would let it survive without Telegram.
“At the end of the day, TON’s ecosystem is just using Telegram as a front-end experience. The app works on the website, too, so even in the most horrible event that Telegram is shut down, TON will still be available to run,” he said.
A billion transactions sounds like a big number, but how big is TON really? It’s tricky to compare on-chain activity, as decentralized networks are often tracked by different parties and measured by different metrics. But to give you a rough idea: Daily transactions on TON stood at 14.6 million on September 10 — that’s about 40% of the “non-vote” transactions on Solana, a more established blockchain that’s currently the fifth-largest by market cap. Toncoin, by market cap, stands at tenth place.
Nonetheless, the total value locked on TON is only $408 million, about 8% of Solana’s current worth of $4.77 billion, according to DefiLama.
These numbers are in line with Booth’s remarks that TON’s current boom is driven by a handful of viral “tap-to-earn” games that reward users with in-game assets for simply clicking on a button, and players trade these assets on exchanges where they are accepted. Solana, on the other hand, attracts far more capital thanks to its vibrant and much more varied decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
One such TON-based game called Hamster Kombat, where people roleplay as crypto exchange CEOs, has amassed 250 million monthly active users, according to Booth. That number is impressive, but it should be taken with a grain of salt, since the “tap-to-earn” mechanism used here is quite menial by modern video game standards and raises valid questions about such games’ longevity.
But for TON, and Telegram by extension, the value of clicker games lies in their ability to bring users to web3 with just a few taps (and keep them there with a financial incentive), Booth said during his speech. And it should be noted that playing web3 games requires users to jump many hoops in the first place — they have to download an app, set up a crypto wallet, and keep lengthy wallet passkeys safe — so anything that makes things easier is likely to be favored.
That’s not to say that studios aren’t trying to build more sophisticated titles for games for TON. Catizen lets players manage and optimize a colony of cats, and has attracted 30 million monthly users, over 2 million of whom are active on the blockchain, Tim Wong, chairman at Catizen Foundation, told TechCrunch. In less than six months, the game has racked up revenue of $21 million.
“Most web3 games acquire users without generating any in-game revenues,” Wong told me. “The mini-game ecosystem is already very established on WeChat, and it’s just starting on Telegram. We believe humans’ need for high-quality gameplay and their desire to spend on entertainment are universal.”
Toncoin may not be going to the moon anytime soon given the charges against Durov or how often Telegram is brought up in relation to bad news. But as is often the case with crypto projects, there is a good amount of fervor and optimism on display here. Roy Chen, a game dev from Denmark who has developed the console-inspired title HypeSaints that runs on TON, pointed out that the major impact of Durov’s arrest has been on Toincoin’s prices rather than the ecosystem itself.
“After all, the potential for crypto mass adoption through TON is huge, thanks to Telegram’s 950 million users,” he said.
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