Talking tech since 2003
//apps Peach //social Social Media social networking

Pretty Peachy: All About The Peach App

by Heidi Helen Pilypas 9 min read

“Are you on 🍑?” Were the words I woke up to today. I wasn’t, but that was soon rectified. I searched the App Store with the peach symbol before realising that wasn’t going to work and typed “peach”. I had no idea what the app was about, I just downloaded. I ASSumed it had something to do with emojis — the peach emoji being particularly notorious (who knows why? 😉). And I was right — emojis play a big part of the design, but it’s also so much more.

Download Peach on the iOS App Store.

What is Peach?

Peach is a brand new social-networking app on iOS, with an Android version in-the-making. Made by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, it’s described as “a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself”. It came out in the US on Friday the 8th of January — much to the joy of those ending their work week. Although it’s been promoted for friends, I imagine it will also be used for professional networking — like as an extension of Twitter. Some brands have already jumped on board as well. Many people are openly sharing their usernames online.

Peach is a fun and simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.

Before you continue reading, if you haven’t already, I recommend you go and download the app (if you have an iPhone)! The features are best discovered by experiencing them yourself! They have a great onboarding experience and it’s really easy to understand straight away.

Doesn’t that peachy colour look glorious on the Home Screen?

Profile

You have your own profile on Peach. At the bottom, you can ‘write something’. You can activate ‘Magic Words’ (see next section). There’s also a camera icon (📷) you can tap which allows you to add photos from your camera roll or take a new one — you can even create a short looping video or GIF (a Looping Photobooth).

Magic Words

This is one of the unique features of Peach. You begin typing one of the Magic Words and the app intelligently gives you fun things to add to your space. For example, type ‘gif’ and you can search for a GIF to post. Type ‘here’ to add your location. Type ‘draw’ to draw something. A list of supported Magic Words can be found here, with Peach promising to add more over time! This is one of the really fun things to play with in the app.

Some of the Magic Words on Peach.

Magic Word — Draw

Using the Magic Word ‘draw’ in the app produces a canvas to draw with your finger. You don’t have any customisation options like colour or thickness of the stroke, although you can undo. You can only draw in a thin black stroke. I think this is a good restriction to make it quicker and less cluttered. I think the style of drawing will also become recognisable as ‘oh, that’s a Peach drawing’. I’ve seen a few drawings on the app so far, and it’s a chance for budding Peach artists to really shine.

I’m super artistic for real.

Magic Word — Shout

I really enjoy the ‘shout’ Magic Word. You can say something in big letters (and of course, you can include emojis also). You can choose a colourful saturated background (or just black or white), change your text size by pinching, make text italics by tapping and hold down to add an image to the background. I really like the style of these images and the text is automatically centred so you don’t have to worry about having equal spacing around it — which I like. The text is also nice and bold and stands out. When posted elsewhere, these ‘shouts’ will end up being recognisable as ‘oh, that’s a Peach shout’. See some I created below.

 peach-shout

Activity

There is a little heart (💟) in the top right of your profile you can tap to view your activity which includes comments, likes, mentions, and what I’ll call actions (like when someone waves at you — see more below). I don’t think it includes friend requests or approvals, for those you get an app banner alert with a vibration.

Actions

When you scroll to the bottom of someone’s profile you can do an action such as wave to them. You can also do this as a reply from your Activity. It’s kind of similar to a Facebook poke, only updated for today to include more actions. The full list of things you can currently do include:

👋 Wave
🍰 Cake
💯 100
👉👃 Boop
😷 Quarantine
😘 Blow a kiss
💍 Put a ring on
😾 Hiss

You will have to use your imagination for what they all mean. I can tell you though, it’s not nice being hissed at. 😢 However, I’ve received a marriage proposal (when someone put a ring on me), quite a bit of cake and some kisses, so it’s all good. LOL! I think a wink would be another great addition, but limiting the choices is probably a good move. Otherwise, we’d have too many emoji contenders!

But can you KIMOJI?

I was curious to whether you could add KIMOJIs to the app, especially the peaches and cream one (who wasn’t reminded of that when they downloaded this app). Apparently you can, although as they stretch to the full size of the screen — they don’t look too good.

What’s it been compared to?

Peach has been compared to plenty of other apps from Path to Slack to Twitter to Snapchat to Ello to Yo to Draw Something.

New vocabulary

Along with the app is a new verb: peach! Similar to ‘tweet’ on Twitter, we can ‘peach’ each other on Peach. The plural of peach would be peaches. We also have the other tenses peaching and peached. People on Peach are called Peaches (not Peachers as some have assumed — I’m looking to the official Peach Twitter account for reference).

Some other words you will get used to include: waved, caked, 100’d, booped, quarantined and hissed.

Feature requests

I’ve had the app for less than 24 hours, and I’m already thinking of other features I would like to have. Do you have any suggestions? Leave them in a note or a comment!

  • Verified accounts — so we can tell if celebrities are genuine or not.
  • Bio — so we can read about people who might friend us and describe ourselves similar to how we can on Twitter.
  • Edit — so we can edit our posts and comments with typos.
  • Unique URLs for posts — so we can share our peaches online.
  • Tappable profile icons in Activity — so when we get a notification we can go to that’s person’s profile.
  • Tappable profile icons on profiles — so we can view profile images bigger.
  • Polls — as another Magic Word “poll”.
  • Feelings — as another Magic Word “feeling” or “mood”. Could use actual words or emojis for your feelings.
  • QOTD — Question of the day Magic Word to automatically answer a question daily. I’ve seen the app suggest “I can’t live without…” to get you started for a post, would be good to make this a permanent feature.
  • Friend count — so we can see how many friends we’ve added. I’ve started to lose count.
  • Hashtag support — so hashtags can be used and become searchable. It may require having public accounts which is something I’d also recommend so we don’t have to approve every request.
  • View likes — be able to click on your hearts to see who liked a post without liking your own post.
  • Detect song from iPhone — at the moment the app doesn’t seem to handle identifying music from your iPhone (using the Magic Word ‘song’) — it pauses the playback while it’s listening. It also can’t work with earphones yet. I imagine it would work detecting music from an external source though.

Who’s already on?

As Matthew Hussey identified in his article on Peach, “It definitely seems to have piqued the interests of the tech press.” People in the tech circle generally jump on these things pretty early to suss them out. I saw it was pretty popular with the Apple community that I follow on Twitter. I’ve included some people I know are genuinely on the app as themselves below.

    • Christina Warren is on with username: christina
    • Federico Viticci is on with username: viticci
    • Matthew Hussey is on with username: TheNextChief
    • Rene Ritchie is on with username: reneritchie
    • i-D is on with username: i_D
    • Mashable is on with username: Mashable
    • BuzzFeed is on with username: BuzzFeed

We also have a whole lot of celebrities on the app. I’m following Taye Diggs (tayediggs) —and regardless of whether this is really him or not, it’s a genuinely funny account (the real Taye Diggs follows me on Twitter so is it too much to believe he could follow me on Peach?). I also promised I’d give a shoutout to Ne-Yo on the app (neyo).

It would be nice if this was for real.

It’s so 2 PM

People like to complain about quitting social media or getting over it really fast. Here’s a selection of some satirical posts, plus some other funnies for ya. Keep it mind, it’s only been out for 1 day at the time of publication.

Why is this app a winner? Because it’s fun.

What sets this app apart from other social networks that pop up and try to gain our attention? Why has this app gone viral so fast? I’d agree with Mat when he says it’s because it’s fun. And he’s not the only one. I’ve seen that word used in more tweets and reviews on the App Store such as: “Fun and simple sharing with your real friends” and “Soooo easy and FUN”.

Final thoughts

I love this app. I think it’s really addictive and fun! I already have heaps of friends on the app. I love all the things it can do and this is just the debut! I’ve gotten heaps of engagement there. I’m glad to be an early adopter. I don’t see this just going away. I think it has everything it needs to stick around and become a favourite in many people’s eyes 👀.

Find me

You can find me on Peach with the username: heidi_helen.

Please share

If you liked this article, I’d appreciate it if you shared my tweet below. Thanks!

Further reading…

Lots of great articles have popped up on Peach. If you feel like doing some more reading check these out.

This article was originally published by Heidi Helen Pilypas on Medium and has been republished with permission.

Read more posts by this author

Heidi Helen Pilypas

The link has been copied!
You've successfully subscribed to BestTechie
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Great! You've successfully signed up.
Your link has expired
Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.