📸 do u love me, poparazzi
this week in apps + platforms
You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: Poparazzi and Bytedance make the CapCut, we stan a cute Dino on the DL and the webpage of all our dreams gets a Gen Z (inter)face lift.
Drink up 🐸 ☕️
p.s. if you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed from this week’s Bucks Fizz: our Thursday dispatch covering the best of TikTok’s unsigned and emerging talent.
what we’ve been sipping on:
📲 “Apps Are Here!” Summer called and it’s telling you to shelfie the selfie. In a week of violent delights and aspirant sends, we were gifted with newcomer on the block, Poparazzi, and the viral TikTok 3D trend from editor CapCut. Now pausing here pals to give you the tea, because we love it when an app debuts, yes ~debuts~ at #1 in Photo & Video. We are ofc talking about Poparazzi, the app that pulled in a cool 200K U.S. downloads on its first day, already totalling an insane 1.3M downloads worldwide over the last four days (for context: Clubhouse gained an estimated 130K U.S. iOS downloads the entire last month according to AppTweak). Imagine not knowing another rank apart from #1? Bloody marvellous.
So what is Poparazzi, let’s start there. Well, as many of us are getting vaxxed, the time has finally come for hot girl summer. But we ain’t going back to our old ways pals...wHaT ArE tHoSe? Instead we’re ditching our Facetune (soz Ms Mongeau), for life’s finer things with Poparazzi: a feed full of your candids snaps taken by the people who love you the most – your pals. Rather than posting your selfie snaps on Insta, which we’ve all established feels cringy af, you entrust your pals to capture your ‘essence’ and govern the style of your social presence.
A screengrab from the newly launched Poparazzi site
Ofc, a launch that propels the newcomer to #1 in these trying iOS 14.5 times had to have a bit of a helping hand. Remember Bella Poarch’s “Build a Bitch”? Ofc you do, its music video secured 122M views in two weeks and is *still* trending on YouTube. Well, the similarities in both debuts? One word: TikTok. Poparazzi founders drummed up hype via a slick TikTok campaign pre-launch which spiraled with the network effects post-launch. Not to be outdone, ByteDance’s editing app CapCut also found itself riding on the coattails of its big sister app TikTok last week, with a 3D zoom trend which saw downloads quadruple and reach its 100K U.S. daily download milestone.
Phrog Photoshoot by @lornethompson
With over 65M views on #3dzoom and 283K videos made to the official trending sound: Playaphonk’s “PHONKY TOWN”, CapCut is back in the prime Gen Z real estate that is the iOS home screen. With both apps ranking at #2 and #3 this week, Bytedance can’t be too mad about it either 😏.
👾 Like a Dino! As you know, we stan a cute free-to-play game (haiii Among Us), especially if it comes with the backstory of an indie dev just trying to fulfill their dreams of becoming an animator. This is exactly the story of @super_toki, who originally launched the first iteration of their rhythm game “Like a Giraffe” back in November 2020. Since then, players have been heavily invested in the characters, including unlocking the cutest skins (see the llama below) and the catchy, upbeat music riffs, allowing the game to achieve a total of ∼500K U.S. iOS downloads in 6 months.
This week however, @super_toki made a critical update citing copyright issues. Gone was the giraffe and in its place, a dino (and a dina for 10,000 points). Some gamers were obviously devastated to lose their characters, but the update wasn’t bad for all 🐸☕️. Enter: Like a Dino!
The game and music were quickly picked up via a TikTok trend (the holy grail for acquisition as we all know) to send #likeadino to 7.9M views. What does that look like in U.S. downloads? Oh, only close to 400K in 6 days, no biggie.
A screenshot of iOS US downloads for “Like a Dino!”
Now sitting at #1 in the US Games category, fyi the most competitive category on the store, @super_toki has a serious playerbase to engage now. But, considering this group are a woke bunch, they ofc, are there to 100% support their creator and their wellness. Players telling developers to “not forget to take a break” in the reviews, well, we simply love to see it. Keep your eyes peeled for this one. Once new skins are launched and new storylines are added, we think this game is going to continue to be a chart topper.
🔧 0 drag, just drops. We’ve seen the proliferation of ‘link in bio’ mini webpages (cc: linktree), but with limited customisation ability, they often don’t pass the ✨vibe✨ check. Enter mmm.page, a website drag and drop builder that is the very definition of chaotic good.
Websites shouldn't all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect. –mmm.page site
We’re so impressed by the ease of this builder especially as it relates to The Gen Z aesthetic, which friend of High Tea Lucy Mort described so perfectly as: The death of "premium mediocre" and the birth of "intentional ugly”. Forget the age old stigma around Comic Sans, nobody is laughing now. Instead “ugly” nostalgic typographies are encouraged against the backdrop of a chaotic collection of memes, gifs and even YouTube videos (because, why not – anything goes!). There is no media inventory and you’re not at the mercy of a template, it’s just you and your creative expression. Here are some of our favorites we’ve seen this week:
Okay, you made it. Now you can go back to your long weekend (honestly, we hope you’re reading this on Tuesday, you deserve a break),
ttyl,