- Yope, a photo-sharing app, is gaining traction with 2.2 million monthly active users.
- Users can create private groups to share photos, videos, and audio with.
- Trying out Yope was a good reminder that it’s hard to convince your friends to download yet another social media app.
The buzzy new social media app Yope’s focus on your private friend circle is also what made it tough for me to start using it easily.
“The difference with Yope is that you’re not taking photos just for the sake of taking photos,” Yope cofounder and CEO Bahram Ismailov told Business Insider. “Every photo on Yope is captured to be shared with the people closest to you.”
Yope is a photo-sharing platform that says it has about 2.2 million monthly active users. Venture capitalists also seem keen on it. The app raised an initial seed round of $4.65 million at a $50 million valuation, Business Insider confirmed.
Yope users share photos, videos, and audio with a private group of friends to maintain a daily streak and view recaps of their days.
I set out as a 25-year-old Gen Zer intending to do a week-long review, but Yope requires users to have friends to work and it took a few days to convince my friends to join another social media app.
When they finally did, it was a fun way to keep up with my long-distance BFF. Their pictures showed up on my iPhone lockscreen as a “Live Activity” when the feature was enabled.
From getting started to maintaining streaks, here’s what my 72 hours on Yope looked like before I hit my deadline to file my first impressions.
It’s easy to get started if you already have a group in mind
Yope is straightforward and easy to use once you’ve downloaded the app. I created a profile and enabled Live Activities before making a group called “Jordan’s Besties.”
The hard part was getting said besties to join the app to make it usable for me. Without them, I was in the private group alone with only myself to post pictures to the collaborative wall.
Your posts aren’t at risk of being seen by users outside of the group chat, and there’s no “explore” section. You can search for others, but you can only see their content if you’re in a joint group.
I finally got my friends to join
Usually, my long-distance BFF and I do weekly recaps of our lives with photos over text. Yope was a cool way to have real-time updates on her daily life.
However, I’m still on the fence about Live Activities. I don’t use the feature at all outside of Yope, so it was sort of intense having photos and streak reminders every time I looked at my lockscreen. I enjoyed it the most when I first received a picture; it was a nice surprise.
As working adults, it’s hard to remember to snap photos of your day, so the Live Activities choice made sense. Our schedules caused us to slack on updating each other, and that came with multiple warnings that our 24-hour timeframe to send pics was closing.
If I wasn’t so distracted by scrolling TikTok and sharing my life on Instagram Stories, it likely wouldn’t have felt like a chore to have another place to exist online.
That might just be the point.
Maybe I’m too old and too online
As a 25-year-old, I’m not completely sold that Yope would fit into my life as it is today. However, I see a number of scenarios where it seems like a great app to choose.
I can see myself using Yope while on vacation to give my friends a highlight reel of my trip. If I want to take a break from Instagram and hundreds of people watching my stories, it seems like it would be a way to scratch my “chronically online” itch without being perceived by the masses.
Yope’s Ismailov described it as a “shared camera roll” between friends. It’s a space without content by influencers or strangers. It’s reminiscent of a time when social media was limited to the Facebook walls of people you knew — an era that younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha missed out on.
“Back in 2012, we had Instagram and it was amazing. Now, let’s create something even better for the next generation,” said Yope cofounder and CTO Paul Rudkouski.
Unlike those born in the mid-to-late-2000s, I was around for almost every era of modern social media. I’ve had an online presence on MySpace, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Tumblr, to name a few.
Yope has promising components that could help it reach a similar level of recognition, but its product-design choices mean it faces a particular challenge: attracting entire groups, not just individuals.
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