If Instagram stole TikTok’s schtick when rolling out Reels, it seems TikTok is keen to repay the favor. The company is working on a new app, TikTok Notes, that seems remarkably like Meta’s popular photo sharing platform.
The company originally teased this idea earlier this month through notifications sent to users, with the title “Your photo posts will be show on TikTok Notes.” The alert explains how TikTok Notes is a new app for photo posts, so future public TikTok photo posts will be displayed on the company’s new dedicated app. It provided an option for users to opt out of TikTok Notes if they preferred to keep their photo posts to TikTok itself.
Wednesday, the company posted on X (formerly Twitter) officially announcing TikTok Notes as an app for sharing both photos and text. TikTok is initially testing TikTok Notes in just Australia and Canada for now, so those of us outside of those countries can’t try it out yet, but the post does give us some insight into how the app will work.
Based on the four screenshots provided, TikTok Notes will have a For You page, just like TikTok, but perhaps more in-line with Instagram’s Explore page. This For You page shows multiple photo posts at once from users across the platform, but if you prefer, it seems you can hit the “Following” tab to check out posts from just the people you specifically follow.
The posts themselves are, as you might expect, a cross between a TikTok and an Instagram post. You can upload multiple photos at once and attach a caption. Along the bottom, you’ll find the comments, as well as a space to leave your own thoughts. From here, there are the usual like, save, and comment buttons, with how many likes, saves, and comments users have left.
Who’s going to use this?
Will this catch on? I honestly don’t know. TikTok is massively popular, of course, but Instagram has very little competition in the photo sharing space. While TikTok has a dedicated legion of fans, I don’t know if they’d feel compelled to make the switch to a new app, especially if they also have an established presence on Instagram for their photo-sharing needs.
What I’m mostly curious about, however, is if they launch an app in the U.S. Right now, the test is extremely limited, but once it starts rolling the app out to more countries, will it bother with one that’s actively trying to ban its products in the first place? The U.S. is Meta’s home turf, though, so it might be worth it to TikTok (and ByteDance) to pick a fight, however short-lived it may be.
