For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, App Store Editors sat down with the developers behind three apps: corner, Partiful, and noplace. Whether by crowdsourcing recommendations for small businesses, helping you plan parties in a snap, or re-creating the early days of social media, these apps put a unique spin on building intentional community.

Eliza Wu knows firsthand how important word-of-mouth recommendations can be for small businesses. Helping out at her mother’s restaurant and her father’s acupuncture clinics when she was a teenager gave her an intimate view of the hurdles small businesses face to find customers.

“Word-of-mouth is a small business’s bread and butter. One recommendation from a trusted friend is worth 1,000 reviews,” Wu says.

She cofounded corner accordingly, making sure star-based reviews no longer reign as the go-to way to find the best coffee shops to work from or a bookstore with just the right vibe. Personal recommendations are everything.

The app’s interactive map serves up curated suggestions from friends and locals—but with a twist: “Every single place has to be added by someone who loves it enough to share it,” Wu says.

When she launched corner with Jake Xia in 2022, the app had zero businesses on its map. Today it’s filled with users’ favorite bars, thrift stores, and restaurants across nearly 400 cities.

Starting with an empty map seemed risky at launch but was core to Wu and Xia’s vision.

“That just seemed like such a small product decision at the time, but it really catalyzed this culture, which is all about positivity and sharing places you love,” Wu says.

Reviews also provide limited information about a place—and don’t convey the communities that frequent a bar or coffee shop.

“I think we’re all very jaded reading thousands of reviews that say the same thing,” Xia says.

In corner, you can add pretty much any list you can dream up—not just great bakeries, but great bakeries with vegan blueberry muffins.

“Places are personal,” Wu says. “They express your identity, they express your taste, and you can see that in corner.”

Users have gotten creative with their lists—one shares bars with an indescribable “main-character energy.” Another gathers the best spots for “feral 4 a.m. dance nights.”

On each business’s corner page, AI sums up the vibe, pointing out that a sushi restaurant might be ideal for a second date but too fancy for a first one.

“We’re using AI to extract the key details and the emotional connections people have to that place,” Xia says.

The benefit of finding a place that feels authentically yours goes beyond the transactional, Wu adds. “You go to a coffee shop you love and you start seeing the same people, maybe you start talking and become friends. Our mission is to do that at scale, so people can start building in-real-life communities.”

1. Stay ahead of trends: Xia uses the trending tags on the map to spot trending places. “Going somewhere that’s totally new has become a hobby,” he says. “I go before the hype hits, because we have that first wave of people saving it in corner.”

2. Finally organize your social recs: So many people have hundreds of saved places across their social media, with no way to search through them, Wu says. “If you see a post or a recommendation that you like, share it to corner. We use AI to find the place and save it for you.”

3. Create a private list: Wu uses private lists to remember details about places she’s visited, like the names of bouncers or waitresses. “Every time I go to these businesses, we’re able to deepen the relationship a little bit more,” she says.

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao cofounded the invitation platform Partiful, they hoped it would bring people together in the face of a loneliness epidemic. “If we can make it easier to gather people, then we make it easier for people to make connections,” Murthy says.

Partiful takes all of the logistical and communication overhead of party planning (and finding) and “collapses it into a super simple and easy-to-use interface,” Murthy adds. “You just tap a few buttons and have a dozen headaches solved for you.”

The app’s handy polling feature, for example, gets rid of the back-and-forth of finding a date for your gathering. When building an event page, hosts can propose multiple dates, and attendees will automatically be RSVP’d to the one that works for the most invitees.

For those not keen on hosting, the app also makes connecting in-person with new people effortless.

“Community is a big part of how we think about Partiful,” Tao says. The Open Invite feature highlights any upcoming events hosted by people who have attended the same Partiful gatherings as you. The more parties you attend, the more your list of mutuals grows—and the more Open Invite events you’ll see in the future on the app’s home tab.

Even the custom event posters peppered throughout the app are built with community in mind. “We’ve worked with dozens of artists who wanted to see their culture or content they’re really passionate about reflected in Partiful,” Murthy says.

Hosts can select from a library of bespoke party posters (or upload their own) to elevate their invites. These, along with GIFs and effects you can add to an event page, make each event your own.

“Our design ethos for event pages was that they should be as fun as attending the party,” Tao says. “You should feel excited about going to the party just from receiving the invite.”

“We really want to allow our users to be expressive and not to feel like an event had to be this stuffy, regimented thing,” Murthy says.

But for both Murthy and Tao, parties aren’t just a good time—they can be transformative too. As the daughters of immigrants, they understand parties are a way to connect with their cultures.

“When you come from an immigrant community, you almost have one foot in two different worlds,” Murthy says. The annual Diwali event she throws with her partner (powered by Partiful, of course) is one way she shares her culture with people who aren’t Indian American. Tao, who is Chinese American, does the same with her dumpling parties.

“Partiful can be a place where these cultures are celebrated,” Murthy says. “Making it easier for people to keep in touch with their culture, even if they don’t live and breathe it every day like previous generations, is one of the most important things we can do.”

1. Poll your guests: In addition to making it easier to figure out when people are free, the app’s polling feature makes the party-planning process more intentional: You start by thinking about the people you want to see, not the date, Murthy says.

2. Be spontaneous with text blasts: Sometimes party details change! The app’s text blasts keep everyone in the loop with last-minute location switches or urgent asks. “It really makes a party a lot more flexible,” Tao says. “You don’t have to think of a party as this monolithic thing that has to happen at a specific place at a specific time.”

3. Share your party photos and videos: “One of the ways we strengthen our memories is by having everyone share photos from the event to have something to look back on,” Murthy says. Partiful makes this seamless. Capture or upload right from the event page—and share the album link.

When Tiffany Zhong took a hard look at the social media landscape, she was disappointed there wasn’t anything for Gen Z or Gen Alpha that evoked the online experience of her youth.

She launched her social media app noplace to harken back to the algorithm-free and text-based forums of the early internet—all powered by your niche interests, or as noplace calls them, “stars.”

“I’ve always wanted to help people find more interest-based friendships, rather than proximity-based ones,” she says. That approach is how she made some of her closest friends. And with noplace, she’s created a space for a younger generation to experience that kind of connection too.

With the app, you can share thoughts that get posted to a global feed. (Zhong says many users—who skew Gen Z and Gen Alpha—refer to it as the world’s biggest group chat.)

“It’s reverse chronological, so it feels real-time, and you can see who’s online now,” Zhong says. “That gives it a sense of community.”

While the feed is core to the experience, the app’s “stars” are the heart of connection. They signal what you’re into—whether it’s videogames, makeup, or music. Add stars to your profile and filter your feed for specific ones to find people with similar interests.

The app makes it easy to express your personality in other ways too. “Our emphasis on customizing your profile is a throwback to MySpace,” Zhong says. “You could change your themes and aesthetic whenever you felt like it—or share your current mood and what you’re currently listening to.”

And noplace is intentionally designed to make tweaking your profile—like adjusting colors or changing how rounded the corners are on your profile picture—as low-friction as possible.

“We wanted to make it very easy to change on the fly,” she says. “It’s really who you are now and who you are today, rather than who you were in the past or your future.”

It cheekily solves a common frustration with traditional platforms. “Why should you only be able to give one like, and not 1,000 likes?” Zhong says. In noplace, you can boost a post with an unlimited amount of likes.

Since the app’s launch, Zhong has seen noplace connect (and reconnect) like-minded people. “Two childhood best friends found each other again in noplace through their overlapping interests,” she says. “It gives me chills.”

1. Add as many stars as your heart desires: “Stars can be interests, personality traits—whatever you want people to find you through or connect with you through.”

2. Swap your profiles: “If you’ve designed the perfect theme but it doesn’t fit your mood, you can save it and come back to it. Maybe it’s a pink day, maybe it’s a blue day, maybe it’s an all black day—you do you!”

3. Search the stars: When you’re finding friends in noplace, try searching different combinations of stars. “It’s a really good way to find others with the exact same overlap of interests as you, because you can go as niche as you want.”