Oasis, a photo-sharing app developed by Chinese microblogging service Weibo, vanished from Apple’s Chinese app store on Wednesday afternoon in the wake of heated online charges over the Instagram copycat’s allegedly plagiarized logo.
A post on Weibo compared Oasis’s logo to an image South Korean design Studio Fnt created for Ulju Mountain Film Festival in 2015. The two are strikingly similar.
Wang Gaofei, Weibo CEO, responded to this post, commenting “Noticed, (the app) has been taken off.”
Oasis – a hybrid of Instagram and Chinese social e-commerce site Xiaohongshu – allows users to edit and upload photos or videos sorted by tags and locations.
Earlier this week, Alibaba-backed social media company Weibo launched the app in an invitation-only mode, as it seeks new sources of growth. Targeting younger generations, Oasis is Weibo’s latest effort to compete with China’s newly minted hyper-popular social media verticals, such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin (known as Tik Tok outside China); both have been luring Weibo users.
Before being taken down, Oasis rocketed up to second in Apple’s top free rankings in China.
It’s unclear yet when Weibo will relaunch the app.
