Dispo ‎- Live in the Moment App Everyone is Talking About

For more of what feels like a lifetime ( a decade), Instagram has been the undisputed queen of photo apps. But now, there’s a new gal in town. Enter Dispo, a nostalgic social network with a disposable camera experience that has been digitized into an app and has the potential to rival IG.

With slogans like "live in the moment" and "be yourself," the app, developed by none other than YouTube personality David Dobrik, is positioning itself to be the anti-app. What sets it apart from Facebook and Instagram, which also let you capture and share moments, is that any photo you take has to be through the app — and it "develops" the next day. Oh, and you can't edit the photos that you've taken with Dispo or upload your own photos.

If you’re still getting a hang of Clubhouse and thinking, do I need to download this? Here are my thoughts.

My first thought after downloading this app is that my life is not interesting enough for me to want to be on it, but who am I kidding. Right now, no-one has an interesting life and this is why I’m here for Dispo.
The new social media app takes away the instant gratification and dare I say toxicity that have overpowered apps like Instagram for far too long. The photos shown are reminiscent of 2012 Instagram, where there was all filters, all vibes, and a post-what-you-want attitude. Mundane and real can be interesting. Candid, casual, and mostly REAL. Oh and there is no #ad content; or any monetization — for now.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Let's take a look inside the app itself. The main interface of the app, currently available on iOS only, is meant to function like a disposable camera. There's a small rectangular viewfinder, which doesn't have any zoom function. Here you can take a selfie, a forward-facing photo, and use a flash. Oh, and the best part? There's no caption features or hashtags on Dispo.

Once you take a photo, it "develops" in your library. The beauty is that you cannot see them right away. This is one of the ways that this app is different from other photo-sharing apps: It takes away all instant gratification. Once photos are developed, you also cannot edit or filter them. You also cannot upload photos previously taken. Every picture is taken through the Dispo camera — a one-and-done experience.

Some things I like

Another interesting difference with the Dispo app is that there is no home feed page. When you use Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the people you follow show up on your feed when they post. Without a homepage, your follower count doesn't matter and you need to manually search for friends on the app or invite them. You can discover new people to follow by clicking around. After a year of isolation, I’m excited to meet people like this.

You can also shoot and save photos directly into "rolls" — aka a collection of "film rolls" — that are categorized by theme.

The invite-only photo-sharing platform launched on February 19 in beta, and in less than a week, Dispo became the fourth most downloaded app on the AppStore, thanks to its Gen Z allure and experimental social features. Each invitee is awarded 20 invitations to pay forward, and over the last week, the app has been accruing users, curious to see its staying power. So let me know if you want in!