What is TikTok Notes? — A New Instagram Competitor

Photo Credit: TikTok

TikTok’s upcoming photo sharing app to rival Instagram, currently in development, will possibly be called TikTok Notes.Some TikTok users have started noticing pop-up notifications mentioning TikTok Notes, a new app to share photos. The notification says the company will soon launch “a new app for photo posts,” currently called TikTok Notes (though this may yet change). Users’ “existing and future TikTok photo posts” will be automatically shared on TikTok Notes, of which users can choose to opt out.

A new photo.tiktok.com URL (now unavailable) has also been spotted by TechCrunch, with a splash image to prompt opening a post in the TikTok Notes app once it’s released. That image implied that users will also be able to write a caption alongside their photos.

“As part of our continued commitment to innovating the TikTok experience, we’re exploring ways to empower our community to create and share their creativity with photos and text in a dedicated space for those formats,” said TikTok in a statement to TechCrunch.

Last month, astute coders found language in the TikTok installation file for Android that suggested the company was working to launch a photo-sharing app called TikTok Photos. But the latest pop-ups within TikTok imply that the company is still trying different names.Similar to Threads’ integration with Instagram, TikTok Notes will likely share close integration with the standard TikTok app. Most likely, Notes will come “prepackaged” with photos TikTok users have already shared, which will prevent it from having to build up an initial user base.

The news follows Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta’s announcement of a new vertical-first video player for Facebook to rival TikTok and draw more attention to the company’s short-form Reels. Meanwhile, TikTok has also been experimenting with 30-minute videos to vie with YouTube, while dabbling in text posts a la Threads and the former Twitter.

As TikTok’s future in the US and Europe is uncertain amid privacy concerns and potential legislation to force Chinese-based parent company ByteDance to divest the platform in the United States, it remains to be seen how any new offerings from TikTok might be affected.

Notably, this isn’t the first time ByteDance has attempted to rival Instagram, although this is the first time it’s used the TikTok brand to do it. The company previously released the Lemon8 app in 2020, designed around sharing aesthetic photos similar to Instagram.