Poparazzi to Shut Down

Poparazzi, the once-hot photo-sharing app that hit the top of the App Store in 2021, is shutting down. The company announced the news via a Medium blog informing users that the app would be discontinued and users had until June 30, 2023 to download their content. Last year, Poparazzi’s founders at TTYL Inc. said the app had grown to 5+ million total installs and confirmed its raise of $15 million in Series A funding. Though Poparazzi had felt at the time like an overnight sensation, co-founder and CEO Alex Ma and his brother, co-founder Austen Ma, had spent three years developing apps and pivoting to achieve the success they generated with Poparrazi’s launch. Poparrazi, however, generated a lot of hype soon after its release, climbing the charts to reach No. 1 on the App Store. The concept behind the app was a photo-sharing-focused social network that essentially took Instagram’s tagging feature and turned it into the entire experience. On Poparazzi, users could tag their friends but couldn’t post photos of their own.