This Trend Has to Stop - Why Lapse is Doomed to Fail

A new app has managed to claim the #1 spot on the App Store this week.

Many apps managed to do that this year, so what's different about Lapse? Well, not much...

But there is an interesting trend I see here that's worth taking a closer look at. If only to protect unaware investors...

Lapse turns your phone into a disposable camera that can take a limited number of pictures and share them with your friends. In the last few days, the iOS-only app rose to the top of the US App Store.

According to our App Intelligence, Lapse got 176K new downloads on Thursday, the highest number of downloads for the app which averaged just 50 daily downloads earlier in the year. Since launching last summer, Lapse saw 1.2M downloads - most of which came in the last few days.

If you're thinking, "this isn't the first time an app has done that", you'd be 100% right! You probably can't remember which because they all came and went very quickly.

BeReal was the breakout success that paved the way for photo apps that do less. It went viral last year and has managed to make its way into nearly 100M phones, according to our estimates. But its popularity faded fairly quickly as well.

BeReal never managed to monetize, directly or through ads, so all of those downloads and users are enjoying server time sponsored by BeReal's investors. Will those investors get their money back? Maaaaaybe. Probably not.

Poparazzi and Dispo are a couple of other names that tried to do something similar, rose to the top for a brief moment, and then disappeared.

Can you guess where they're now?

Poparazzi was removed from the App Store after daily downloads dropped into the single digits. It raised $15M according to Crunchbase. Dispo has lost most of its momentum and is getting about 800 downloads per day. It raised $24M according to Crunchbase.

Other than the two doing something similar enough to Lapse they also share one more (very bad, in my opinion) trait with Laspe - all three are iOS-only.

For a social network, or really any app that allows you to do something with your friends, being iOS-only is a huge hurdle. This is arguably the reason why Clubhouse lost its shot at social platform glory.

According to Crunchbase, Lapse raised $12.3 from 16 investors, including Google. Sure, Google could lose every penny it put into it and not even realize, but what about the other 15 investors that wanted to ride Google's coattails? I doubt they're getting anything.

I'm not trying to discourage people with ideas, but replicating failure without making any changes is a great money oven. Do your research first, please.