Over the last few days, UpScrolled went from a relatively unknown app to the top of the App Store, as users flocked away from TikTok. Here are the details.
A few days ago, the years-long saga involving the future of TikTok in the US finally reached a conclusion, as a U.S.-based joint venture now runs the app.
This transition, however, hasn’t been smooth, with users experiencing a wave of technical glitches and service disruptions over the last week.
This, alongside concerns regarding TikTok’s new owners’ close relationship with the current U.S. administration, prompted users to look for alternative apps to fulfill their scrolling needs, with many landing on UpScrolled.
If you’ve never heard about UpScrolled, you’re not alone. The app was released just 7 months ago, and its last App Store update was on November 2, 2025.
Yet, it seems to be the leading candidate to replace TikTok for a subset of users looking to move away from the app. UpScrolled reached the top of the App Store over the past week and is currently in second place, behind ChatGPT.
UpScrolled is developed by Australian-based Recursive Methods, a company founded and owned by Jordan-born app developer Issam Hijazi, who’s also an Australian citizen.
Just yesterday, Hijazi posted a video on UpScrolled celebrating the fact that the platform had crossed 1 million users.
In the post, he thanked the app’s newfound community for allowing it to grow “at a pace [he] could only have dreamed of,” detailed his background, and explained his motivation to build and run the app.
9to5Mac’s take
As anyone who’s lived through similar exodus events on other social networks will probably tell you, this obviously doesn’t mean that TikTok is doomed, or that UpScrolled has made it as a definitive replacement.
But it does underscore the fact that even well-established social networks are always just a few missteps away from falling out of favor with a subset of their users.
And when you’ve got around 2 billion users, any small subset of them can amount to a massive opportunity for competitors, old and new.
You can find UpScrolled on the App Store.
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