Facebook says it is shutting down Lasso, its TikTok clone launched a year and a half ago, on July 10
Facebook is no longer betting on Lasso, an app it launched a year and a half ago, to take on TikTok . The social juggernaut's TikTok clone is shutting down on July 10, Facebook said.
The closure also foreshadows where the effort actually went — rather than running separate clone apps, Facebook later folded short video into Reels inside Facebook and Instagram, the same consolidation it cited when retiring features like Facebook Live Shopping.
First-order effects
Lasso's remaining creators and viewers have until July 10 to export or abandon their content, and Facebook's standalone TikTok competitor disappears from iOS and Android entirely.
Second-order effects
TikTok loses one of the few big-company copycat apps aimed directly at it, leaving the short-video field to TikTok itself and to Facebook's own in-app products like Reels.
Third-order effects
The pattern across Bonfire, Lasso and later feature retirements points to Facebook abandoning standalone clones in favor of folding viral formats into its core apps, where its existing user base does the distribution work a separate app never could.
The trend: Big platforms are learning that cloning breakout social apps as standalone products fails, and are instead absorbing those formats into their existing apps — a cycle TikTok itself would later repeat when shutting down side bets like TikTok Music.
Facebook's TikTok clone lasso is shutting down ahead of the Instagram Reels launch, so basically Fb lost 2 years by half-assing. Brb, gotta go save my zero Lassos https://twitter.com/...
Lasso had fewer than 80,000 daily active users on Android — the highest it has ever had — in Mexico — its biggest market — on June 1, according to App Annie. It had so few users on iOS, and it struggled so much in other markets, that App Annie could not track it. https://twitter.…
This is strange since Lasso (Facebook's TikTok clone) started doing well recently. Crossed 1 million monthly Android downloads for the first time in April, consistently top 10 in social in 2nd-6th largest countries in Latin America (never launched in Brazil). https://twitter.com/…
For me, one takeaway of all the clones that FB makes + then shuts down is that these just don't work. Its most successful efforts outside main newsfeed have either been organic early moves of its own (eg Messenger, poss Workplace) or already-juggernauty acquisitions (Instagram). …