Considered as the rival of ByteDance, the Chinese firm Kuaishou Technology announced that they are closing down the operations of their short video app Zynn by this month. The app had attracted many controversies.
The reason as to why the company is shutting down has not been made clear. It was launched in May 2020 and claimed that it had over 1 billion monthly active users. It was available only in the US. It had been found that the platform had been paying people to watch their videos to meddle with its ranking on the US iOS App Store. Similar to TikTok, the app was then removed from the Play Store on the grounds that it stole videos from other apps. Apple’s App Store also removed Zynn on similar grounds.
The shutting down of Zynn in the US will not affect the other services of the firm in other markets as stated by a company spokesperson. The Chinese firm has the Kwai app in South America and Snack Video in the South Asian region.
The firm had recently raised $5.4 billion in its Hong Kong IPO this year and it said that their plans for the “international markets remain unchanged”.
The user base was not so strong for Zynn. It only had about 200,000 monthly active users in the month of June. In August 2020, it had about 3 million active users.
