Amo, the buzzing Paris-based startup that continues to release consumer social apps, is dropping its third app today. And it will look very familiar to former Zenly users, as Amo’s third app is a location-sharing app — just like Zenly.
In case you missed the previous episodes, Amo is a relatively new startup created by 10 co-founders (yes, 10) who all worked on Zenly, the location-sharing app that was acquired by Snap and became one of the biggest social apps to were created in Europe and then terminated by Snap.
For the past year or so, they’ve been working on a galaxy of tightly-linked social apps — an account, a friends list, a notification screen, and a shared design system.
Amo has launched ID for the first time, a brand new image on your social media profile that lets you express yourself with stickers, photos and designs. ID allows you to create a raw, 3D profile. And it’s also a fun collaborative space as you can throw some content at your friends’ profiles.
With the second Capture app, Amo creates a social camera app. It’s an innovative way to take photos and a shared camera with your friends and loved ones. It’s not BeReal, it’s not Locket, and it’s definitely not Instagram.
Amo’s new app, Location, is probably the easiest to describe and understand. It’s a location-sharing app so you can see what your friends are up to, get to know them a little better, and spend more time with them — in real life. In other words, it’s just like Zenly.
“And the third application will surprise you less. It’s kind of ‘Zenly Lite,’” Amo co-founder and CEO Antoine Martin told me a few weeks ago.
The site is both a utility and a social networking app. When you open the app, you see a map with your friends. You can tap on someone’s profile to see how far they are from you, send some hearts, ping them by tapping their screen, and tell them you’re on your way.
“We are trying to make something a little more adult, not to fall into the childishness of Zenly. But we still want to let you do that when a friend is late,” Martin said while showing me the knock-knock button to ping someone. “Or to do this, this, this, if it’s really, really late,” he pressed the button a few times, which covered the screen with 3D hands tapping the map.
It’s these kinds of nice features that set Zenly apart from pure utilities like Apple’s Find My. You can zoom in and out on the map using one hand by swiping your thumb up and down the side of the screen. You can move from one friend to another by swiping on the profile card — it’s like a carousel of friends.
“You have all kinds of little details that we’re working on to recreate Zenly, but better than it was before,” Martin said.
However, the site wants to be as useful as it is entertaining. From the profile card, you can also make a call or send a message (via iMessage) or open a navigation/directions app like Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Uber. You can also see your friend’s battery status — and the app isn’t supposed to kill your battery.
At this point, if you’ve already added a lot of people to ID and Capture, you might think you don’t want to share your location with everyone. Amo has built a simple privacy screen across all its apps. You can add a friend to any of the company’s apps and enable or disable a specific app. For example, you can choose to share photos with your work friends in Capture, but turn off location sharing in Location.
Do people still want something like Zenly or have they moved on? When you type Zenly into the App Store, you get a handful of Zenly clones. They’re not just trying to recreate Zenly’s features. They literally look and feel just like the old Zenly. It proves that there is still some interest in the location sharing space.
Now, let’s see if Amo can bring back old Zenly users and convince new ones to sign up — at least some of those potential users are already using ID and Capture. It will be interesting to see the network effects between these three applications.
