Lapse - Disposable Camera Ratings and Reviews

Kinda obsessed

I really love this app so much. When I downloaded it, I really was expecting to be intrigued for a day and then forget about the app, but it’s actually so different and unique and FUN. This app makes me feel like a kid again who snapped everything and anything just because I had a camera in my hand. I love that it takes time to reveal the photos you took because it forces you to snap the picture, and then move on and be in the moment. You can’t look at the photo and add text or a filter or a song or nit pick what you don’t like and take it hundred more times. You just snap and move on and by the time they’ve developed you really only care to keep the good images and continue on with your day! I love that it’s a journal that showcases your life and organizes you’re wonderful moments in a beautiful way, instead of them getting lost in my phones camera roll mixed in with things that are not post worthy etc. I love the friend model instead of the followers. I love that lapse DOESNT notify you or have a list of anyone whose looked at your posts, I love only having my journal for my friends. It’s so special. The only change I would consider them making is, please change the emojis that I use to react to my friends photos, the last or most frequent ones that I choose, not you choosing for me. 💗💗💗 love lapse. 💗

Super pushy.

Signed up because I got an invite from a friend, and instantly my phone was taken over by the app. This is slight hyperbole, but the point is I felt like I was opening a video game app as my phone started playing a video and vibrating. Then as you try to go through the sign up, they push you over and over again to “invite five friends!!!!! Find five friends!!!!! INVITE 5 FRIENDS.” You can skip this step but ONLY by hitting the help button, otherwise they do not give you the option to skip inviting people. Then it forces you to take a snap immediately? I was using the bathroom at the time so it was super weird for me. Then if you try to fill out your profile at all it also forces you to upload like 3 snaps or you don’t get to update any info on your profile? So you literally have to add snaps before you can finish setting up your profile. It’s just super pushy and annoying truly. Like please let me take this at my own pace or I’m just going to delete the app and never try it again.

***edit***
I still find their tactics annoying, but I’m getting more into the swing of using the app? It’s really annoying that I’ll try to post every day though and they still won’t give me the lab tools. Like I share and it says “shared 4 out of 5 days out of 7” and I’ll share the next day too and it’ll say “shared 4 days out of 5 out of 7” like wow okay cool so posting regularly doesn’t even work half the time.

Incredible App; everything I’ve ever wanted BUT it logged me out and I have no way of accessing it.

Hello everyone. I want to start with the fact that I have been simply obsessed with this app since I downloaded it in October. I have used it to document all important, casual, day-day events in my life. It didn’t matter the situation my lapse was always out with me documenting everything in a way that just brought so much joy to my soul. I go through the app and revisit all those lovely memories it’s helped me create.

I sent a DM to the team over in IG asking for help; as I found out today that I had been logged out of the app. When I entered the phone number I thought I had used it said that I was new, and to start a new account, after processing that for a bit I remembered when I downloaded it, it required a US number, I have been living in Colombia since July, and I remembered I had a google phone number so I used that, thinking it would never be necessary again. I was wrong. & that has caused me incredible sadness as I do not have access to that google phone number anymore and google will not give me access to it. Please, support, I need help, I need my account back & if I can’t have it back I just want the pictures that’s all I care about please.

Love this app but could use a little work!

As an avid hater of what Instagram has become, I love Lapse! I love being able to see my friends posts instead of ads, businesses or influencers. I hope with the rise of popularity, that doesn’t change but we’ll see after time.
I love the friend not follower model. However, the find friends could use work. I wish it would show me more options instead of showing the same people that I don’t know at all. You have to add the people listed before you are able to see new options of friends you may know. I’ve been digging through other friends’ friends list to find my friends which is a bit annoying. It also shows me when someone joins lapse but I’m like who are you? I don’t even know who they are.
Another big thing that I hope they work on is deleting photos. I’ll post on lapse and decide I actually don’t want a photo to post and delete it, but it only deletes it for me. My friends are still able to see it hours later and it’s a little embarrassing especially if I take multiples of the same photo. That’s my main gripe with this app. Otherwise I love the app and I can see it becoming the next big thing as long as it doesn’t fall and make the same mistakes as other big apps. I love the personal touch to Lapse. Please don’t fall to ads and business models. Love you!

What I Hope Will Be The Next Social Media App

This app is so epic. I love that there are no ads or promotional stuff, only updates on when a friend of yours thought to pull out their phone for 2 seconds and take a quick snapshot- one that you can’t see until you’ve forgotten about taking a picture in this is a trait I love about disposable film cameras since it makes the experience of taking and viewing a photo so rewarding- but it’s cool to see it applied to the convenience and increased connectivity of smartphones. I hope no businesses or corporations will think of using Lapse (formerly Journal) as a new tool to exploit for advertising like BeReal. Also, as a photographer, I’m bothered by the digital look of captures when all I could do was pull out my phone without any creative control over the camera settings. By using Lapse for documenting fleeting moments, I embrace the vintage edit, and I can carry on with life, satisfied with how my photos turned out. As for the rebrand, however, I don’t think I’ve met any friends who’ve liked the new logo. The watermark it adds to pictures when you save them ruins the lower half of the image. Please fix that Lapse. The goofy logo betrays the film quality of the photos.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your thoughtful review, we worked really hard to bring that special ✨film energy✨ to your iPhone, hearing how much you've been loving it makes our day! Don't worry, we are working creating more ways for you to export your beautiful images.

Annoying privacy nightmare that tries to force you to shill for them

Lapse is an interesting concept, especially if you have a busy/interesting life and lots of friends (which not everyone does), but the app has too many gimmicks that make it a pain to navigate and set up your account. Every onboarding screen relies on annoying flashy animations and videos with haptics that can’t be skipped or disabled. When making an account you’re constantly asked for identifying info that you either can’t choose not to provide (camera access and full contacts access) or can technically decline but wouldn’t think to (the option to skip providing your exact birthdate, for example, is hidden under a grayed-out “help” button. They require you to add 5 friends before you even explore basic features, which defeats the whole purpose of getting people interested in a new app. Probably an unpopular opinion but I don’t like being required to do certain things that enrich an app’s developers just to see if I’d even want to use the app. After only 30 seconds of access to my contacts (I switched it off after they let me through) the app had already uploaded the full names, contact photos, and mutual connections of all of my contacts, ranging from my deceased relatives to old friends I’ve fallen out with to random coworkers I never speak to. I challenge the developers to reply to this review, since they only seem interested in responding to positive or non-constructive reviews.

New Update Ruined Everything I Liked About The App

Before the update, I loved this app. I had a small community of just close friends, no influencers, no businesses, none of the consumerism that TikTok and Instagram have become. I kept my friend group intentionally small so I only saw who I talk to on a regular basis. It was personal, relatively simplistic (setup was clunky, but I let it slide), and I loved the idea of sending emojis to my friends on posts I liked.

Post-update took away literally all of that. Now the Community is the primary feed and my friends are shoved into the top section as Stories that are timed like Instagram, so you don’t get to enjoy the post because it flips to the next picture too fast. I now see random people’s posts who aren’t even in my area of the world - the feed feels completely random. I don’t even use that section of the app anymore. I just take cute photos and don’t share them and just put them into albums. Don’t get me started on the forced watermark when screenshotting or exporting photos. Silly and stupid to push your branding onto people for free marketing. I’d rather use a different vintage film camera lens app with no social element than deal with this silliness.

It feels like the company got a new CEO or something because these features don’t feel like the old version of the app at all - it’s completely changed direction. Bad move imo.

Love this app but scammy features

I love the concept of this app, very fun and different way to approach social media. I love the filters, truly looks just like my 35mm camera! The concept of the developing time is fun and I really like how it prevents you from doing a bunch of retakes in the moment. The process of posting is easy and intuitive.

I wish there were a few tweaks to the process of downloading, requiring you send to 5 seems excessive especially when you can’t send to people already on the app. I get the idea behind it, but it’s been a turn off for some of my friends who don’t want to go through the long process and bug other people to download. I also wish you could just use the filter on existing pics or export without logo. I recently updated so you can no longer screenshot, you must export with the app logo. It’s not a very appealing logo/ watermark- I think it detracts from the overall vibe of the picture. I would repost to other platforms more if it was a little more streamlined or better placed. It really just makes me want to crop it out.

I hope this app catches on and more people download, it’s really a good idea just could be improved user experience!

I Hope This Isn’t The Future of Social Media

Weirdly pushy. You open the app, you’re bombarded with “The Story” — which is like, the first 5-10 minutes. Instead of letting you organically move around the app, which, with good design wouldn’t need all the hand holding and intrusive narrative building (is this social media? Is it a camera app?) it traps you in a long sequence of text and photos. After that, you MUST add 3 friends who are already on the app. After that, you MUST invite 5 people who are not on the app. Which like, I don’t even know if I WANT to invite people to the app yet because I haven’t used it. I don’t want to recommend something that isn’t worth it, and honestly FORCING people to invite people before they get to even use the app feels desperate.

The first experience I got with this app was that I’m not smart enough to figure out how to use the app on my own (why do we have an instruction guide for a social media app that isn’t anything we haven’t seen before? Or isn’t just a combination of things we’ve seen before?) and that I’m not allowed to use the app until I trap five other people into this process. It feels like a MLM but thank god I don’t have to spend money.

I kind of like the premise, and I think it could be a pretty good social media app, but I never had to invite 5 of my friends before I used Snapchat.

I miss 2 months ago lapse

I love this app, it is my new favorite way to interact with friends with social media. That being said, I’ve found the updates which now forbid screenshotting to be gratuitous and annoying. I get it, u wanna monopolize this aesthetic and get as much money as you can out of people, but the app is just much more annoying to use now as someone who is absolutely not going to pay for a membership, and I just crop out the lapse symbol the majority of the time anyways. Like, my screenshotting has nothing to do with you. This amount of control being exerted over my user experience makes me want to not use the app anymore, let me do what I want with my pictures that I took. It’s especially frustrating having used the app before this stupid restrictive “if you buy a membership you’re allowed to have fun again” system was implemented. The app is also way buggier now, It crashes and freezes and makes copies of recaps from the same album over and over when I’m trying to download recaps from each of my albums separately. This app just feels like it’s getting worse over time compared to the freedom us users had a few months ago and it’s honestly upsetting to me what with how much I’ve enjoyed it up to this point.