After trying to buy TikTok, adtech giant AppLovin launches its own social media challenger

AppLovin lost its bid to buy TikTok, and now it is taking its social media aspirations into its own hands.

The adtech firm quietly released a new app this month called Gist that feels a bit like a hybrid of TikTok, its sister app Lemon8, and the Chinese app RedNote. Gist's feed, which requires a referral code to access, features photo carousels, videos, and mini-games.

"Welcome to Gist," the app tells users upon joining, describing itself as a "handbook for the curious, the grounded, and the real."

Users can select content categories they're interested in, such as travel, relationships, or career advice. There are travel recommendations in the form of photo carousels, before-and-after weight-loss journeys, AI-generated videos of otters, and even a Flappy Bird rip-off.

With no formal announcement of the new app yet, Gist's quiet launch is a strategic way for the platform to build a user base and stockpile content before going to the masses. There are already dozens of accounts on the app, including lifestyle content creators who get a special "founding creator" star next to their profiles.

AppLovin's core business is mobile-app advertising. It's going a bit left field by rolling out a creator platform. Giovanni Ge, the company's product and engineering chief, said in a February podcast that the goal was to bring exclusive, monetizable traffic to the company, noting that the path forward would not be easy. Bloomberg earlier reported on the plans.

AppLovin declined to comment.

Other tech companies without existing social businesses have similarly tested launching social feeds. OpenAI released its video app, Sora, last year, for example, but later pulled back to focus on revenue-generating businesses.

AppLovin's got a new app strategy

To fill Gist with fresh and relevant content, AppLovin is currently hiring a specialist focused on recruiting US creators and overseeing "operational workflows to ensure high-quality content production."

This isn't AppLovin's first venture into social. In April 2025, the company told President Donald Trump it wanted to "explore a purchase of TikTok in all markets outside of China." It ultimately lost out to a buyer consortium that included Oracle and investment firms MGX and Silver Lake. The company also invested in Flip, another TikTok competitor that went belly up at the end of last year.

Last year, ahead of the eventual TikTok sale to the consortium, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi told Business Insider that his thesis for buying the company was that AppLovin's proven ad revenue machine could help boost what he saw as an undermonetized asset. Plus, AppLovin has expertise in both handling user data and controlling complex algorithms, which the company said would have helped it remove biases from TikTok's content recommendation system — one of the reasons TikTok's Chinese ownership was met with US government scrutiny.

The same thought process will likely be applied to Gist. The company may also hope this new app provides a boost to its e-commerce ads business, since popular social apps — like TikTok — tend to attract this cohort of marketers.

AppLovin originally grew by helping mostly gaming app developers make money through advertising and by helping them find new users by placing ads on other apps. In 2024, it began a push for e-commerce advertisers, a move that sent its stock soaring at the time as Wall Street saw the potential to unlock billions more in growth.

The company's market cap was over $163 billion as of Friday.

On a May earnings call, Foroughi said AppLovin's consumer vertical — non-gaming advertisers — was "growing even faster than gaming," with the segment's March revenue up 25% versus January.