Peachis a new social network for iOS. Madeby Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of Vine, Peachis described as a place to “keep up with friends and be yourself.”
Like other social networks, you’re identified by an avatar and username, and you can post status updates, photos, links, and location to the app. There is no newsfeed on Peach; the home timelineonly shows you a preview of your friends’ latest post, and you have to tap on their profile to see more.
What makes Peach unique is the set of “magic words,” or words that automatically populate content within the compositionboxon the app. They include “GIF,” which lets you search for a GIF within the app; “song,” which will identify a song that’s playing by using your iPhone’s mic; and you can doodle with “draw.” There are 20 magic words in total, and you canfind them here.
Peach
To likea post, tap the heart beneath it. You can comment on posts by tapping on them. There’s also a feature that reminds me of Poking someone on Facebookscroll down to the bottom of your friend’s timeline and you’ll see a command to send an emoji.
Peach
The app is a bit like work chat app Slack in that word commands automatically pre-populate content to post.But the app requests fairly comprehensive access to your data in order to use them. For instance, you have to give Peach permission to access your motion and fitness activity in order to use the “move” magic word, and locationpermissionsto share “here.”
Peach
It’s only available on iOS for now, though Peach says a version for Android is coming soon.
Because Peach has no real-time feed, it feels a bit like I’mtalkingto myself whenever I share anything. I am sure most of my “friends” on the app have many others, so they’re probably not going to see most of my content.
The most engagement I’ve had so far on the app is from friends sending me emoji notifications, which you can do quickly by replying to them in your notifications tab. The pointless notifications evoke memories of Yo, the simple notifications app that also gained widespread popularity briefly on Twitter before mostly disappearing.
Peach’svirality on Friday, fueled bypopular media and tech users onTwitter, reminds me of social media platform Ello, the minimalistic social networkthat tried to compete with already established apps. Ello became wildly popularvery brieflybefore it turned into a punchline for failed social startups.
It’s much too early to say whether Peach is yet another flash-in-the-pan social app that will have a brief moment in the sun before going the way of Ello and Yo and Path or even Secret. Although Peach is similar to many other social apps, its features are unique enough to keep us mildly interested, at least for now.
Photo viajacksonsorchard/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
