ByteDance's Hypic Is Coming for the Photo Editing Market
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - AI Is Everywhere. Check out the full article for more insights.
By now, everyone knows about CapCut, the video editing app from TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, that became the leader in its category and one of the highest-earning apps in the world.
But, ByteDance has another app that's been around for a while, but this year grew exponentially, threatening yet another adjacent niche - a photo editor called Hypic
Hypic was released at the end of 2022 and its downloads rose very quickly, hitting 4M in July of 2023, according to our App Intelligence. Downloads dipped from that peak for the rest of the year, but Hypic still managed to get 19M estimated downloads in 2023.
2024 was much more consistent with 37M estimated downloads, and 2025 is even bigger with an expected 44M estimated downloads.
The majority of those downloads came from Google Play, where Indonesia and Vietnam are the top markets. The US ranks second on the App Store behind Vietnam and 11th on Google Play.
That's good news for Hypic, which is currently #12 in the US App Store. It means there's a lot of growth to be had. But it's also very bad news for popular photo editors like Facetune, Picsart, Photoroom, VSCO, and Lightroom - all of which make multiple millions every month.
For a long time, Hypic wasn't monetized, which is what led to all those downloads. But just like CapCut, ByteDance eventually started monetizing, and users don't seem to mind.
Are Users Paying?
Our estimates show that consumer spending in the app started rising quickly in 2025, going from under $100K to $250K in April, to just a tad bit under $1M in August, to $1M+ ever since. November was Hypic's best month of revenue with $1.3m of pre-fee revenue.
Summed up, our estimates put Hypic's pre-fee revenue at $6.7M for the year (not including December).
Compared to the competitors I mentioned before, Hypic is the smallest. VSCO, the closest competitor in terms of revenue, is more than 3x larger.
But considering how fast Hypic got to $1M/mo, TikTok's scale, and CapCut's history, I think all competitors should be concerned, and the smart ones will need to get even more competitive.
The real question is, how quickly will Hypic take over the US? I'm going to keep an eye on that.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
