Peach app still kinda fuzzy
Is Peach the next big thing or just a flash in the sputtering social media pan?
Peach is here. ”Posting on it is a lot like texting, but with a twist,” claims the new social media platform’s welcome email. It’s like Weird Twitter meets the unfiltered nature of Snapchat with a dash of Yelp thrown in — you and friends can post doodles, share GIFs, give anything a 1- to 5-star rating, share a song you’re listening to, create your own looping videos, and more.
It makes sense that meshing aspects of several popular social media apps together would make Peach a slam-dunk success, but since the app launched early this month (to sizable buzz), many tech experts and outlets declare the app to be a mere flavor of the week — as of writing this, Peach slipped from peaking at No. 85 on the U.S. iPhone downloads chart to dipping from the top 200 completely. Sure, the fonts, colors and design are pleasing, but the app’s navigation is clunky at best and confusing as hell at worst. The “home” screen features friend updates, friend requests, the link to your own updates and like three other options that seem borderline pointless. You can do things like “boop” or “wave” at someone, which harkens back to memories of Facebook poking, a feature exclusively used by huge creeps, from my personal experience. The other main page shows post by “friends of friends,” similar to Instagram’s “Discover” tab, which seems like a misuse of the app’s toggle option. Because of overwhelming roster of posting options, it seems users — including myself — don’t quite know what to make of Peach, and why we actually need it. Maybe teens are loving it and at a tender 28 years I’m just out of the demo. (I only recently discovered Kik, a messaging app the ~teens~ have apparently been using for years that’s still going strong.)
Only time will tell if this new app has staying power, but so far, the outlook isn’t so peachy.