TikTok is in the hot seat again, this time as legislation moves forward that could ban the popular app in the United States.

With the legislation still in its early stages, the app won’t be disappearing from our phones anytime soon, explains The New York Times. Still, the ruckus around its potential ban serves as an important reminder of the vulnerability of social media: No app is promised forever, and therefore neither is its content.

What you can count on is that as long as social media is a “thing,” there will always be something else to turn to.

Instagram feels an obvious alternative to TikTok—they have a good chunk of their user bases in common and offer similar features (many of which were developed by Insta owner Meta in an effort to keep up with TikTok). But in a turn of the tables, TikTok is reportedly working on a photo app aimed at competing with Instagram, according to an exclusive from The SpAndroid.

The India-based blogger, who typically reports on Google-related news, did some sleuthing in the backend code of the TikTok app to discover evidence that appears to suggest users will be prompted to post their still images on the new app, referred to as “TikTok Photos.”

Sharing photos on TikTok isn’t entirely new—and the app has been prompting more users to do so of late—but videos remain TikTok’s overwhelmingly more popular medium, so it looks as if the platform wants to try its luck with a separate app.

This wouldn’t be the first experiment with a new app by ByteDance (owner of TikTok): Last spring it introduced Lemon8 to the market, coincidentally around the same time TikTok was making will-it-be-banned headlines. Lemon8—which I described then as “Instagram with a Pinterest-y concept”—was a bit fun, but it never really took off, despite an early surge of popularity.

Do we really need an Instagram-like app from TikTok when we already have Instagram itself? Unequivocally no. But TikTok has its loyal users, and in the world of social media, we can never say never.

(Image courtesy of TikTok)

 

 

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