Meta launched Pocket in the US, and the app it came from shut down the same day

Meta has launched Pocket across the United States. The app it is based on shut down the same day. Pocket had been testing quietly in Brazil since July. It is now available to everyone in the US. Pocket lets people type a prompt and get back a small interactive thing, which Meta calls a gizmo. Those gizmos publish to a scrollable feed where other people can play them, save them, repost them or remix them. The company describes it on its own site as “a new creative platform to make and share gizmos”. It is free, on iOS and Android. The app it replaces was called Gizmo Pocket comes from the team behind Gizmo, an app built by Atma Sciences and founded by former Snapchat engineers. Meta did not buy that company. It hired the team and took a non-exclusive licence to the technology, Business Insider reported, having scooped the move in March. Business Insider, which has used both, describes Pocket and Gizmo as “pretty much identical app experiences”. Even the vocabulary carried over. Gizmo called its creations gizmos, and so does Pocket. Atma announced on Thursday that it is winding down. “Earlier this year, our entire team joined Meta,” the company posted, “where we have been working on a new app.” Josh Siegel, who led it, called the shutdown bittersweet, “a labor of love by so many people for the last couple years”. He said he was excited for Pocket. The desk has seen this structure before Hire the team, licence the technology, leave the company standing until it is not. TNW reported this month that Nvidia agreed to pay Poolside $6bn for a licence and jobs for 109 of its staff, in a deal both sides insisted was not an acquisition. Meta’s version cost less and moved faster. The team joined in March, the product shipped in July, and the original was gone by August. A licence is not an acquisition, and neither is a hiring round. The outcome here looks the same as one. What a gizmo actually is The creations respond to taps, swipes, dragging and the tilt of a phone. They can play sound effects and clips of songs, and they can pull photos from a camera roll or use the camera and microphone directly. Pocket has comments, likes and reposts. It has no direct messages. Links to individual gizmos open without the app installed, which is how Meta expects them to spread. Creators can also fine-tune a prompt after the fact, adjust the visuals and add music, rather than starting again. Meta told Business Insider there are no plans to connect Pocket to Instagram or its other apps at the moment. That is unusual for the company, which normally routes new products through the audience it already has. It runs on a model developers are still waiting for Pocket is built on Muse Spark, the model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. TNW reported in June that Meta had repeatedly delayed the Muse Spark API that outside developers were promised. The model launched in April, the interface slipped, and Meta had no scheduled date until it said it would arrive that month. The desk’s line then was that a model without an API is a demo rather than a platform. Meta has now shipped its own consumer app on it. The company has not said what the current API position is, and this piece does not claim to know. What is on the record is that Meta shipped a consumer app on the model before outside developers got a stable way in. Meta is shipping apps at speed Pocket joins a run of standalone launches. Instagram Instants came first, then Forum for Groups, Seller for Marketplace, an experiment in AI bedtime stories, a Creator Studio app, and this week a Meta AI app for Mac. The company also runs Vibes, an earlier experiment in AI-generated video, inside its Meta AI app. Zuckerberg told analysts in July that AI-assisted development is why. “I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” he said. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.” Meta AI already reaches users elsewhere in the family. It arrived in Threads DMs worldwide in July. The market Pocket is entering Vibe-coded apps and games have been filling app stores, which is part of Pocket’s pitch. A gizmo is not a download. The money in the category is real. Emergent reached a $1.5bn valuation in July, and Lovable hit $500mn in revenue with 146 employees. Those tools build software people use for work. Pocket builds things closer to a meme you can touch. The bet is that the second category is bigger, because it needs no reason to exist beyond being fun. Business Insider names Sekai and Wabi as startups attempting the same social version, and reports that venture investors are backing the category. What is not established Meta has not said how many people used Pocket in Brazil during the July test. It has not said what it learned there, or why the US was next. It has not given a figure for gizmos created, users, or any other measure of traction. There are no ads in the app yet. Meta has not said whether there will be. Business Insider noted that a new app is a new advertising surface, and interactive posts are an obvious place to put a brand. The terms of the Atma deal are not public. Neither Meta nor Atma has said what the non-exclusive licence cost, or exactly how many people moved across to Meta Superintelligence Labs. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.