Facebook’s NPE Team, a unit inside the social networking giant that creates innovative consumer-facing social apps, has now combined the third app to its lineup with the launch of meme creation app, Whale.
An Introduction to Whale
Currently, the app enables users to enhance photos with text and stickers to produce memes that can be shared to social media or messaged to friends.
The app is not all that unique, given the excess of image-editing apps on the App Store today with comparable feature sets.
But it does have the benefit of being free to use without in-app buying or subscriptions.
In Whale, users can either click a photo, choose a picture from their camera roll, or scan the app’s library of stock images to create a meme.
Blank, 2-grid, 3-grid, and 4-grid canvas designs are also accessible.
To customize the images, users can combine emojis, text, effects, and filters like laser eyes, vortex, or bulge, for instance.
In extension to creating shareable memes, users can make their image stickers applying the crop and cut tools.
And those with creative abilities can use the added freeform drawing tool, as well.
Like different NPE Team apps, Whale is not allowed for download in the U.S.
Instead, it is only accessible in Canada for the time being, which is the home market for the first two NPE Team apps, Aux, and Bump.
More About The NPE Team
Facebook had published its plans for the NPE Team back in July, revealing that it would aim to quickly experiment with new ideas and shut down those projects that did not obtain traction.
Its venture in building new mobile social experiences appears at a time when Facebook’s suite of apps is suffering severe competition from newer publishers, including most prominently, Snapchat, and TikTok.
More broadly, the social networking app business is now filled with Snapchat platform apps, like Yolo or LMK, at the head of the charts, alongside more latest video chat apps like Houseparty and Marco Polo.
App store data firm Apptopia was first to detect Whale’s launch, which was reported by The Information.
The app appeared on November 15, 2019, according to App Annie, but it has not yet listed in any App Store category at this time.
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