Chaopin, an App Made in 2 Weeks, Takes Aim at Chinese Fashion on Weibo

The folks behind Steply and Stepcase apparently decided they were looking for a challenge. Make a complete app in two weeks? That sounds challenging enough!

According to their blog, although it was mostly an expiriment to see if they could make an app in two weeks, the secondary goal was to learn more about how people on Sina Weibo share and view photos.

If you’re interested in the nuts-and-bolts, their blog has some details on the app’s development process, but what they ended up with is Chaopin, an iOS app that allows users to view and rate fashion photos and share them with their friends via Sina Weibo.

It’s a little like a hot-or-not app for Sina Weibo via iOS devices, except that many of the photos are industry fashion pics rather than user uploads. Here’s an introduction video (it’s in Chinese but the app is quite basic so it’s easy to understand regardless):

Users can upload photos to the app, but it’s a little clunky at the moment. Users wishing to upload their own photos must do it via Sina Weibo. Tagging a Weibo post with #潮品APP# will add its photo to the application. But after that, there’s no way for them to see how other users have rated their photos.

It’s a brand new app that was made in two weeks, though, so it’s probably not fair to criticize it for lacking features just yet. The folks at Stepcase plan to develop it further after it’s been out long enough for them to gauge the user response.

Personally, I think their bigger concern may be conceptual. To me, it seems pointless to vote random fashion photos up or down to no particular end. If the team at Stepcase increases the interactive features, it might make a cool Hot-or-Not type app where people can get feedback on outfits they’ve created for themselves via the votes of the anonymous masses.

Then again, I’ve never been that interested in fashion, and I never look at fashion pictures on Sina Weibo, so obviously I’m not the target market for this app.

Chaopin has only been out for a few days, so the development team didn’t have any useful user statistics to offer us yet, but we’ll keep an eye on this. Sina Weibo remains red hot, and even though I have my doubts about Chaopin at the moment, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it really take off with a few feature additions and a little streamlining (how ’bout a direct upload option in the app, guys?).

You can give Chaopin a try here (iTunes link).