Image credits: progress
Lapse, the photo-sharing app that rose to the top of the App Store with a growth hack earlier this year, is starting to lose momentum. The app previously forced users to invite friends to join, a technique now used in Amo’s new social app ID, which has seen early success with this technique known as “going viral.” I got it. In September of this year, the app jumped from 118th place overall to number 1 on the US App Store. But a new report reveals that growth hacks alone aren’t enough to sustain an app. Over the course of this month and last month, Lapse’s download numbers began to decline and are now down 70% from its October peak.
This data from app intelligence firm Appfigures shows that using growth hacks to get to the top of the App Store is not the path to continued success unless your product has the ability to retain new users over time. .
Originally launched in 2021, co-founders (and brothers) Dan and Ben Silvertown say they want to recreate the feel of point-and-shoot cameras, where users take a photo but there’s a delay before the photo appears. I said I built Lapse with an idea. This artificial limit is a feature that has been tried before in other photo apps like Dispo and Later Cam. However, after a while, Lapse’s team realized that users were using his Lapse as a photo diary and pivoted to address this need. The new version of Lapse still retained the gimmick of “developing” photos at random intervals later in the day, but it also organized photos into albums, allowing users to create their profiles with monthly photo dumps. Refocused. This mimics a trend seen in larger apps like Instagram.
Lapse’s pivot wasn’t always well-received, as TikTok ads and its invitation mechanism fueled growth. Sheel Mohnot, VC at Better Tomorrow Ventures, said: Posted in X, Regarding the app’s invitation system, he said, “I felt it was dirty.” He also added that Lapse “used a pyramid scheme to get to the top of the App Store.” others He also called this type of onboarding “annoying” and said he had to “spam” his friends.
However, Lapse remained at the top for a while. According to Appfigures, at the beginning of September his Lapse was averaging only 8,000 downloads per day, but by the end of the month he had 210,000 downloads per day. It also became the most downloaded app in the US App Store and continued to rank in the top 5 every day. By October, the number of daily downloads reached a peak of 218,000 in one day. But then things started to slide.
Although Lapse has seen an increase in new installs, downloads have fallen to 63,000 per day in the last week, down 70% from its peak. By Friday, November 24, that number had fallen to 44,738. Lapus has not yet responded to a request for comment on the data, which was first made public last week.
This follows a similar trend seen with apps such as Dispo and Poparazzi, the latter of which surpassed 5 million downloads after its release, but failed to gain much traction among users and shut down the service earlier this year. I had no choice but to terminate it. Additionally, data from analytics firm SimilarWeb lists BeReal as another photo app that is losing momentum in the U.S., with monthly users dropping from 3.7 million in November 2022 to 3 million in August of this year. He pointed out that he did. But BeReal rejected that characterization, saying it still has more than 25 million active users worldwide, without commenting on usage in the United States.
Either way, no matter how quickly newcomers to the social or social photo app space rise to the top of the App Store, it seems difficult to maintain that momentum. Meanwhile, the same trend is already underway, even as his Amo ID, a quirky new app that combines the collage-making features of the likes of Pinterest’s Shuffles with the social he network, is making headlines. There is a possibility.
ID also encouraged users to invite friends to join, but saw a decline in installs after release, according to data from Appfigures. I’ll let you know more about that later…