But Houseparty, which has previously been popular mainly with teens, builds in a slew of other features meant to encourage interaction, including the ability to remotely play games like trivia or ‘Heads Up,’ or to jump into ongoing conversations your friends are already having in the app ‘Zoom by day, Houseparty by night,’ Sima Sistani jokes Īt its core, Houseparty’s free mobile and desktop apps let people video chat with friends or family, similar to Zoom or Apple Inc.’s FaceTime.

Of course, that’s not a fair comparison given the vast number of existing users of the trio of Facebook apps (Facebook alone has seen around 2.5 billion downloads), but it’s still an impressive achievement for an app that has only really become well-known in the past few months.īloomberg interviewed Houseparty cofounder and CEO Sima Sistani, who suggests that it’s become the default choice for fun rather than serious video chats. It has been the most popular social networking app in the App Store every day since March 20, giving it more daily downloads than Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp… We suggested Houseparty as an alternative to Zoom earlier this month, and a report today indicates that it has seen 50 million sign-ups in the past month.

Free for mac download House Party