Houseparty The chat bubbles float above other open apps. It’s a small window with a list of your friends (the average user has 21, Houseparty tells me), a flag indicating whether they’re online, and the ability to wave at them and start a video conversation. The desktop app looks a lot more like AIM in its heyday.
The mobile app, which opens to a camera screen, feels similar to many mobile-chat apps like Snapchat, where the goal is to broadcast yourself to a select group. It’s the company’s first product since its original app. Today, June 4, Houseparty is rolling out a Mac version of its app, at Apple’s WWDC developer conference in California. Its latest update should address that by taking the app beyond the phone. The company says users have asked for a way to do other things while chatting, as using the app takes over the entire phone. Users spend an average of 51 minutes per day chatting with their friends, Houseparty says, either in groups or one-to-one, through the app, which alerts users when their friends log on. The company says it now has over 20 million users, the majority of whom are young, many of high-school age. Houseparty, a video-calling mobile app born out of the ashes of live-video streaming service Meerkat, launched in late 2016.
