Meta opened Pocket to everyone in the US, an app that turns a written prompt into a small interactive game, and it’s killing off the original Gizmo app it bought from Atma Sciences to get there, per TechCrunch. The games react to touch and to tilting the phone, play sound effects, drop in song clips, and can pull from a camera roll or open the camera. Players post them to a profile where others save, remix, or repost them, with a scrollable feed handling discovery. Pocket lands in a run of standalone Meta apps that includes Instagram Instants, the Reddit-style Forum, and Seller for Marketplace listers. Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s July earnings call that AI-assisted coding is what makes shipping them cheap, and that Meta will keep scaling new ideas through its recommendation systems.
