Life On Air, developers of Meerkat, pull the app from the App Store to focus on group video chat app Houseparty
Remember Meerkat? It came out of nowhere in early 2015 — a star of SXSW, in particular — and was on everyone's tongue for weeks. Then came Periscope …
Context & Ripple Effects
Meerkat was the breakout star of SXSW in early 2015, but within a year it was fading — usage dropped as Periscope outcompeted it on distribution and discovery, and the App Store stopped featuring it. By March 2016 the company had already signaled the exit, ditching the livestream format entirely to chase a video social network instead.
Pulling the app closes that arc formally: Life On Air is consolidating everything behind Houseparty, the group video chat app it had been quietly building since a February launch. The bet pays off quickly — by December the founders are raising about $50M for Houseparty in a round led by Sequoia, with earlier Life On Air backers Aleph, Comcast and Greylock following on.
First-order effects
- Meerkat users lose the app outright — Life On Air is withdrawing it from the App Store rather than maintaining two products, so all remaining attention and engineering shifts to Houseparty.
Second-order effects
- The pivot removes Meerkat as even a nominal rival to Twitter's Periscope in live broadcasting, while positioning Houseparty against a different set of players in group video chat — a category where the company can claim momentum rather than a losing head-to-head.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer social startups that lose a platform-distribution war will increasingly cannibalize their own product rather than fight on — trading a hyped but declining brand for an unproven one, and letting prior investors carry conviction across the pivot, as Aleph, Comcast and Greylock did into the Sequoia-led round.
The trend: Consumer video apps are migrating from public livestreaming toward private group chat, with founders willing to kill their own hit product when platform gatekeepers like the App Store tilt distribution elsewhere.