June was a good month for newcomer apps.
Let’s drive straight into it.
The Cringe
Banger, from the guys who built The Ick.
The Ick, by the way, was an IG stalking app that got removed from the app store. Those are easy to grow, but hard to legally keep out there. Remember them, Katch, Tea For Dating (which returned in the meantime), and many others, all gone.
Those guys know what they're doing, though. They went straight to 50K+ downloads and a ton of MRR.
They kept the exact same branding, some of the same creators, and went for the same playbook.
Mostly a "since when does [platform] have this feature?" type of hook, which is a tricky winner used only for quick growth.
It's a bit of a dark/misleading pattern, but it's widely used across verticals, take "google docs has this feature??" by GPTZero for example.
Also, they've been blasting in LATAM, which is smart. There are way more WhatsApp users there.
Ciril AI
Ngl, I love this one. I've been chatting with friends about this new romance reading trend, and I've seen the vertical starting to bloom.
I think it's underexploited by this new app.
They've had a handful of small hits, but it's obviously AI-generated slop content. Why do that to yourself?
I think a better name that sounds more like "Make your own dark romance with your crush," plus real UGC, similar hooks, and edgier angles would make it a winner.
Use AI and ElevenLabs to create personalized, well-crafted romance stories that users can listen to, and you could have a winning product. It is also highly marketable through BookTok (high engagement vertical). Add interactive features, and it could become a massive app.
The opportunity in this space is enormous.
Pose Genius
It has a really cool concept and seems to attract plenty of views. The monetization potential is less clear, but it could be a strong entry point into a broader all-in-one AI photography app.
The format is excellent. It’s fast-paced, polished, and the app demos fit naturally into the content.
The style I enjoy most because everything feels smooth and effortless.
The team there really thought it through before building the app. A good use case of AI that I haven't seen before. This is a great example that there are still plenty of untapped AI wrapper opportunities, even if it feels like every idea has already been explored.
MyPromise
The app is less interesting than its hook: "like Pinterest, but…"
This hook has been generating hundreds of millions of views for Shelf, Snap It, and Aesth.
I mean, what a winning hook. Riding a larger platform to target existing, relevant customers is not a new hack. Airbnb used it on Craigslist, and many others did it before short-form content.
Self squeezed that one in different languages and minted so many views and hundreds of thousands of downloads.
One hook is all you need (sometimes).
Voice AI Phone
This one taps into all the AI pranking happening these days and mixes it with the fact that people get spam and scam calls daily.
It’s especially powerful because they can show the phone directly throughout the entire video, with the app name staying visible at the top.
In my opinion, they could improve the app UI to make it more graphic and less text-heavy when shown in the video.
But they are doing extremely well in terms of views. Monetization is still to be determined.
Talking about pranks, the talk of the town is Meta glasses-powered POV prank videos. The one app that is absolutely crushing it with this format is Sherlock, with multiple 10M+ views on dedicated accounts.
I feel like this is only the beginning of this type of format. It’s a more expensive format to run, but it’s also harder to copy and has much higher view potential. You just have to figure out how to fit and position your app within it.
Human API
YC company Human API is just tasks and crowdsourced data branded as the easiest side hustle. It’s trying to carve out a space around Noise, Sideshift, and others. If it works, you can expect a sea of competitors to follow.
It’s "all distribution" after all today, although their app has 1.3 stars, so they should probably reset and fix things.
ForeverBooks
This is probably my favorite one I found recently.
"I printed my family group chat as a book."
This is more about the hook than the product, although the product is neat too. I feel like app UGC style content is underused for physical products, and there is a lot to gain there.
These are my picks of apps I saw in June.
They might not be the “best apps," but they are the ones with the most distribution potential.
Hopefully, this gives you some inspiration, and maybe yours is next in line. Summer and new models bring many opportunities, and the novelty never stops.
What a great time to build viral apps.