Coined as “A daily personal audio show featuring your friends”, the app displays a smiling cup of, you guessed it, cappuccino, set in front of a yellow background on the iOS App Store. Boasting a 4.1-star rating, Cappuccino allows for you to share audio stories that can be composed of pretty much anything, from major life updates to all those inside jokes you have with friends or family.
Podcasts have become increasingly popular, and with the ongoing pandemic, listening to other people go into detail about interests you share and being able to relate to certain topics can serve as a way to regain that connection we have lost through the past year. It’s not just the content as well, but for others, simply just the personality of the hosts are enough to want to listen to a podcast time and time again. The experience of listening to a podcast tends to be more intimate and simulates the feeling of being with friends. This app was designed to do just that, provide the means necessary to create an experience with your friends that you’ve always wanted.
The way it’s designed is by starting off with each member of the group recording an audio message called a “bean”, and from there you can mix it with background music. The next morning, members of the group will receive a notification that their cappuccino has been brewed, a.k.a the audio is ready. When you press play, there is a nice intro track that starts, succeeded by the voice memos.
The app focuses on creating these intimate experiences with your friends and family, so while it does fall into the category of social networking, there aren’t any incentives that allow for followers or sharing on a platform inside the app. The design is private for real friend groups and synthesizes a relaxing mixture of funny and happy messages from each friend in the group you form.
With this privacy in mind, the app wanted to take basically the opposite approach to typical podcasts. While it can be complicated to record and release a podcast, they’re consistently long, and there’s a primary goal of attracting a large audience of people. The app makes it easy and short, and most importantly, personal.
With the newest 1.7.1 version, the app has put out a feature called “public show” where prompts will be put out for creators to answer, such as “What’s the craziest dream you’ve had?” or “What’s the worst food known to man?”. It’s free to download, and only requires 71.1 MB of space and iOS 12.4 or later. For more information about it, you can check it out here on the App Store.
