Chinese social media app RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu, gained nearly 3 million U.S. users in one day earlier this week as a flood of self-proclaimed “TikTok Refugees” joined, according to new data from analytics firm Similarweb.
The Chinese-language app had about 3.4 million daily active users across both iOS and Android devices in the United States as of Monday, up from fewer than 700,000 the day prior, and around 300,000 the week prior, according to the Similarweb estimate.
The influx of users has been driven by a looming U.S. ban on TikTok, used by 170 million Americans, on national security concerns.
The data suggests an even larger shift to RedNote by U.S. users this week than was previously known, explaining its dramatic rise to the top of U.S. app store download rankings. Reuters reported on Tuesday that more than 700,000 new users had joined the app in only two days.
Meanwhile, U.S. usage of TikTok declined ahead of the ban, down 2.1% week over week to about 82.2 million daily active users, Similarweb said.
If only there was a no button…
But why would any legitimate app ask for a permission for which there is practically no legitimate use? I thought Rednote was a social media thing, not a Caller application, so why does it need to make and manage phone calls on my behalf?
What else is it doing that it doesn’t need to ask permissions for? Please think critically.
And yes before someone mentions It, yes this can be used for getting a phone number automatically, but It can just prompt for my phone number (which it doesn’t need anyway, unless you post), no legitimate need to ask for such a broad permission.
More to the point, why tf are y’all so chill about this? Surely this is like literally a sign of malware 101? Like I’m only a compsci & cybersec grad so what do I know, but this to me is equivalent to opening “not a virus.exe” from “veryrealmoviedownload.com”. Literally first malware I got as a kid on Android was like this.
I thought awareness of this was pretty commonplace. The below image is literally a Facebook-tier meme that even grampa probably knows.
Are y’all just that desperate for a win? Sorry, good things don’t actually happen in our hell world.
Is this a normal thing for apps to do these days? I don’t use any other SM apart from Lemmy and only F-Droid FOSS apps so i’d legitimately like to know. Does tiktok also prompt for making and managing phone calls?
Basically every mainstream social media apps do want your contacts these days, yes. Obviously bad for OPSEC so you should avoid them if you’re worried about that even after blocking those permissions.
“Contacts” is a very very different permission from making and managing phone calls, and is prompted for separately.
The former harvests data, the latter can be used to steal money directly via the same mechanism we used to text numbers to buy ringtones and J2ME apps back in the day.
Now I’m not saying that Rednote is definitively malware and I actually kinda like some of the content I saw, which I couldn’t say for TikTok (I’m way too ADHD for short form videos, it’s very unstimulating), but maybe just keep it in mind.
Rednote isn’t tik tok. You’ll absolutely be monitored on there. That’s an implicit agreement for all Chinese apps that has Chinese citizens as users. In fact they do what US government keeps accusing tik tok of but tik tok doesn’t do. If your worried about the Chinese government getting your info, absolutely do not use rednote. It wasn’t made for you to begin with. Accusing them of doing what they promised they would do however is a bit strange to me.