Amo, the buzzy Paris-based business that continues to release consumer social applications, has released its third app today. And it will appear quite similar to Zenly fans, since Amo’s third app is a location-sharing app, exactly like Zenly.
In case you missed the earlier episodes, Amo is a relatively young firm founded by ten co-founders (yep, ten) who previously worked on Zenly, the location-sharing app bought by Snap, which grew to become one of the largest social applications made in Europe before being shut down by Snap.
Over the last year or two, they’ve been working on a slew of linked social applications—one account, one list of friends, one notification screen, and a shared design system.
Amo first introduced ID, a fresh twist on your social network profile that allows you to express yourself using stickers, images, and drawings. ID allows you to generate a three-dimensional, raw profile. It’s also a wonderful collaborative environment since you can post items on your friends’ accounts.
Amo is developing a social camera app with its second app, Capture. It’s a unique approach to capturing images as well as a shared camera roll with your friends and family. It’s not BeReal, it’s not Locket, and it most surely isn’t Instagram.
Location, Amo’s latest app, is arguably the simplest to express and comprehend. It’s a location-sharing software that allows you to see what your friends are up to, get to know them better, and spend more time with them—in person. In other words, it’s the same as Zenly.
“And the third app will take you by surprise the least.” It’s sort of like ‘Zenly Lite,'” Amo co-founder and CEO Antoine Martin told me a few weeks ago.
Location is a utilitarian app as well as a social app. When you launch the app, you will see a map with your friends on it. You may touch on someone’s profile to check how far away they are, send them some hearts, or ping them by banging on their screen to let them know you’re on your way.
“We’re trying to build something more adult-like than Zenly’s childishness.” “But we still want you to be able to do this when a buddy is late,” Martin said as he demonstrated the knock-knock button for pinging someone. “Or to do this, this, this if they’re really, really late,” he said as he pushed the button many times, covering the screen with 3D hands banging on the map.
It’s features like these that set Zenly apart from pure utility applications like Apple’s Find My. By swiping your thumb up and down the edge of the screen, you can zoom in and out on the map with one hand. Swiping on the profile card allows you to navigate from one buddy to another, similar to a carousel of friends.
“You’ve got all kinds of little details that we’re working on to recreate Zenly, but better than it was before,” Martin went on to say.
Still, Location aspires to be as helpful as it is entertaining. You may also start a call, send a message (via iMessage), or launch a navigation or ride-hailing app like Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Uber from your profile card. You can also monitor your friend’s battery level, and the software isn’t meant to drain your energy.
If you’ve already added a lot of people to ID and capture, you may be thinking that you don’t want to reveal your location to everyone. Amo has included a basic privacy screen in all of its applications. In any of the company’s applications, you may add a buddy and activate or disable a certain app. For example, under Capture, you may select to share images with coworkers but deactivate location sharing in Location.
Is there still a desire for something like Zenly, or have people moved on? When you search Zenly on the App Store, you’ll find a slew of Zenly clones. They don’t just aim to imitate Zenly’s looks. They look and feel just like the old Zen. It demonstrates that there is still interest in the location-sharing area.
Let’s see if Amo can reactivate previous Zenly users and get new ones to sign up; at least some of those prospective customers are currently using ID and Capture. It will be fascinating to observe how the network effects of these three applications interact.
