Gimmicks have a way of either being something fun that people keep coming back to, or something that gets used once and then forgotten about. It all comes down to the individual, as most things do. After all, you might hate something like Apple’s Animoji, while someone else might love saying something to someone they know as an animated shark.
The tech behind Animoji (and Memoji) is pretty cool, but the feature itself is obviously supposed to stand on its own. Apple sees these types of things, these built-in feature sets, as a means to keep people on its platform. Want Animoji? Well, you’ll need an Apple device for that!
Sure, there are alternatives out there, but Animoji and Memoji have that Apple marketing and brand awareness behind them, and that counts for a lot.
Animoji was already a great feature for families, but it’s hard to deny that it found its peak with karaoke. There was a time there, what already feels like forever ago, that you couldn’t navigate the internet for long without running into some kind of show with three (or more) floating Animoji singing some popular song. That has died down quite a bit since, but I don’t think it’s completely gone just yet.
But the real draw has to be families. Just a quick and cute way to send a message, something that they can all have fun with. A friend of mine says he uses Animoji all the time with his wife, because both let their four-year-old son play with it. I can’t even tell you how many “Go Penguins!” from a bear’s head with a kid’s voice I’ve received.
(My friend finds this hilarious because I’m a Boston Bruins fan, which has a bear mascot. So the bear is rooting for another team!)
But Animoji is definitely a gimmick, and I’m curious if this is a feature you actually enjoy using and do so on a regular (or semi-regular) basis. Or is Animoji and Memoji something you tried out once and never went back to? Would you use it more often if it worked beyond just the Apple ecosystem? Let me know!
