I noticed a new name inching its way up the top charts last week - ten ten.
The app calls itself a walkie-talkie for your best friends and joins the wave of apps meant to connect you to a smaller subset of people, like BeReal.
If you've been around apps long enough, you know this isn't the first app to turn your phone into a walkie-talkie. That was a big trend many years ago that died out also many years ago.
is it coming back?
The downloads suggest it could.
ten ten managed to rise up to the 6th position on the top downloaded apps and games in the US App Store last Wednesday, a rank it held for exactly two hours. It's dropped quite quickly since, ending the weekend at 215th place overall.
The downloads started climbing earlier in the week, very slowly, and in that week, ten ten got almost a half million downloads.
The majority of those downloads, 42%, came from the US with all other countries adding single-digit shares.
ten ten's differentiator is its lack of "social" network. You can only walkie-talkie with your "family" (which really means anyone you add, but family sounds better). We've seen many apps using this to differentiate and compete against established platforms like Instagram.
While ten ten may not be the next breakout success it's interesting to see "social" shrinking. I expect we'll see a lot more of that and that Meta will try to get into that in some fashion as well.
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