Houseparty was developed on ashes of Meerkat, a popular group video chat app whose users spend 20 million minutes in a single day. Working name of the Facebook app is Bonfire, which is targeted to be released in fall, but Facebook doesn’t have anything to share right now.
Ben Rubin, founder of Houseparty observed that most of the people don’t broadcast more often and just handful times whether that is Meerkat, Facebook Live or Periscope of Twitter. So, he built Houseparty team. Whenever user’s friend is online, a notification invites him or her to virtually hang out with the friend over the smartphone.
The app hype mostly attracted teenagers, and by November 2016, the app had 1.2 million users. That was a threat for Facebook especially with such social network’s growth. It could be the reason why they wanted to acquire Snapchat.
Currently, Houseparty is amongst the top 200 apps in the US Apple App Store, according to App Annie.