When people were first introduced to the concept of lockdown in March of 2020, apps of all kind were blooming. The Houseparty app was one of the most popular social app sites. However, the journey hasn’t been easy.
Before settling on their final success story, Houseparty went through a few different iterations. Two Israeli entrepreneurs, Ben Rubin and Itai Danino, founded Life on Air Inc. Their primary goal was and continues to be, to put people together who are physically separated from one another.
The first platform, Yevvo, was released in 2013 which was the first live video platform for Life on Air Inc. Despite the fact that Yevvo gained hundreds of thousands of users, they weren’t successful. As a result, yet another platform was born: Meerkat. The issue with Meerkat was that a website called Periscope was gaining so much attention and users that Meerkat lacked the resources to keep up with it. In the end, it turned out to be a partial success that everything failed before Meerkat. If it had not, things wouldn’t have turned out well for Houseparty after all.
In 2016 the current platform of Houseparty was released but the success did not come right away. After the Epic Games (the developer of Fortnite) bought it back in 2019, the best was yet to come. In March of 2020, the downloads for Houseparty increased by 2902% from February and the app became nr. 1 social app in App Store and nr. 3 in Google Play in 82 countries – the app was blooming and everyone was using it.
It’s not even funny to say that the Houseparty’s issues had only just begun. The first rumours started to circulate after a month after their remarkable success. According to tweets on Twitter, users of Houseparty were allegedly hacked. Users confirmed that suspicious activity had been detected for example in their Spotify and even PayPal accounts, with some accounts being completely compromised.
Houseparty stepped forward to put an end to the rumours, even promising a million dollars to the person who could identify the hacker and reveal him to them. They assumed the hacker was employed by a marketing company of some kind. However, the problems did not end with the hacking; after learning of the hacking, people were having trouble deleting their accounts. Users on Android, in particular, had problems; they had to send email after email before getting the desired result. However, it was reminded to people that these types of allegations should not be made without concrete grounds of proof. Currently, Houseparty is placed 29th in the Social Networking category in U.S. (SensorTower) and unfortunately has lost its charm from last spring. But maybe there is another successful turn around the corner?
