Need A Quick Answer? Pop Lets You Take Two Photos, Poll Your Friends

Do you have trouble making decisions? Do you have to get your friends’ input on a bunch of things? Are you 15 years old? Then you might like Pop, a new iPhone application today making its official debut, which lets you quickly ask your friends for feedback by sending them two photos.

Basically, Pop is a simple voting app with a more limited number of choices compared to other social polling tools like Polar, Thumb, Loop, Voto, and several others. Instead, the interface here resembles Frontback, with one photo on top and the other below. Meanwhile, the quick decision-making Pop demands is reminiscent of dating apps like Hot or Not or Tinder.

The user experience in Pop is straightforward: You take two pictures, optionally type a question, then pick your audience, which could be “users nearby,” “friends nearby,” or “all friends.”

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You can also scroll through your contacts list to select individuals but because the app is lacking a search function or a decent scrolling feature, this is almost impossible to manage – at least until the contact picker gets fixed in the forthcoming app update, as promised.

Or to put it more plainly, unless you get a group of friends to join you on Pop, or you’re in an area where there are a good number of Pop users, there’s not much you can do right now. Popped questions can’t be shared more broadly to social networks like Facebook or Twitter, which seems like a miss. Instead, users who don’t have the app on their phone are sent a text message that prompts them to download it. This can be a delicate area, as unwanted texts – even from friends – can be viewed as spam.

But the app’s co-creator Thomas Lee says the team is working to launch Pop at local college campuses, which they see as being the target market for the app. (I’d think high-schoolers would be better, but what do I know? I’m old.)

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“People would usually ask people things like ‘what shirt should I buy?’ or ‘what should I wear tonight?,’ but it’s very annoying taking pictures over text or on FB messenger,” explains Lee, who built the app with Khalid Karim, and Alessia Vettese, as a part of Toronto-based Next 36‘s accelerator program. “We wanted to build Pop out of sheer frustration for a more streamlined solution; we essentially built it for ourselves,” he says.

The team threw the app together in about a month, and the first version launched in mid-February. Now comes the larger challenge: getting people to actually use the thing, which is easier said than done. But Pop is fun, simple to use, and leans heavily on elements of already popular apps, which could help give it a push.

You can give it a shot yourself – it’s a free download here.