Leave doom scrolling behind - Banbury entrepreneurs launch new social media app

Oscar Smith and Jake Townsend’s app, Drippli has just been launched on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

The pair’s innovation came about because they felt the usual, time-consuming social media had left behind sharing of genuine updates and meaningful moments with friends, family and close contacts.

"We felt social media had become dominated by endless scrolling, algorithms and strangers’ content. We wanted to build something simpler that helps people share meaningful moments with the people who matter most,” said Oscar.

"The idea came from a frustration we both shared – we seemed to be spending more and more time on social media but seeing less and less from the people we actually cared about.

"We wanted to create a simple way for everyone involved to contribute their memories in one place without all the distractions that have become common on traditional social media and then, importantly, be able to put their phones down.

“We're not trying to get people to spend more time on their phones. We're trying to help them capture and share the moments and things that matter - then get back to living them.”

With growing concerns around the impact of social media on wellbeing, particularly for younger users, the entrepreneurs felt there was room for a different approach.

With Drippli, users can follow friends and family similarly to other social platforms like Facebook.

"The big difference is that people create shared albums around moments or things that matter such as holidays, birthdays, weddings, family events or nights out and then invite others to contribute their own photos and videos,” said Oscar.

"Instead of everyone's memories ending up scattered across different phones, WhatsApp groups and social media accounts, they're all captured in one place.

"A photo can't exist if it's not in an album (no more scrolling through endless selfies of strangers!). We're also doing things a bit differently by limiting users to three posts per day and one new album per week,” he said.

“The aim is to encourage people to share meaningful images rather than endlessly posting and scrolling. An album can also have a maximum of 99 photos before it's closed for new uploads...meaning no endless scrolling!

"Most social media platforms are designed to maximise engagement and keep people in the app for as long as possible whereas we've taken almost the opposite approach and built Drippli around quality over quantity.”

Oscar and Jake are getting involved in community events.

"We are attending things like Banbury parkrun, the Banbury 10K and local fairs, creating Drippli albums for the events and encouraging people to add their own photos and videos. It feels like a natural fit because people already take lots of pictures at these events, but they rarely end up seeing everyone else's,” said Oscar.

"Our ethos is that the best memories are rarely captured in a single photo but built from lots of different perspectives, moments and experiences shared by the people who were there or have things in common. Our most popular album at the minute is ‘Dogs being dogs’.”

Drippli is available now on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. For more information visit: https://drippli.app/.