About

Peach is a social networking application released in 2016 by Byte, Inc. The social network immediately gained popularity due to its simple interface and fun "Magic Wand" commands.

Release

After Vine was acquired by Twitter, one of its co-founder, Dom Hoffman, created Peach. Released on January 8th, 2016 for iOS only, the app was meant to compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter. The application was immediately popular, reaching the top 10 most downloaded apps in the iTunes app store.

Features

Peach allows users to create a profile, like other social network messaging apps, and to friend other users; the other user must accept the friend request. Then, there are two ways users can interact; they can either issue a series of pre-built commands directly to one friend, like "Wave," or Boop, or they can post an update, which will be seen in the feeds of all of their friends at once.

Screenshots of the Peach app

The app also includes a series of text commands which unlock features; for instance, the word "time" will add the time to the post, and the word "song" will use the phone's microphone to identify a song being played nearby. These text commands are called "Magic Words."

The Magic Words used as text commands in Peach

Reception

Upon its release, Peach was covered widely in the press, with articles in many tech-based publications like Wired, Tech-Crunch, and CNet. Reception was mixed, with many interested in the new features that the app contained, but others worried that the app would quickly become obsolete, as had happened to other social networks like Ello. In addition, David Carroll, a professor of New Media at Parsons School of Design in New York, wrote that the app was a proprietary data catcher, and that it was bad for privacy:

“Peach is a proprietary platform in every way, perhaps more than anything we’ve seen to date in the evolution of social media apps. It diverts our attention away from the Open Web and into a privately-owned walled-garden. It [is] fun and playful with clever magic words that induce you to share more meta data.”

By January 11th, three days after the app's initial release, some publications were saying that it was already on the decline, with the app store rank dropping from 85 overall to 129 in two days.

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