Forget Snapchat, this app is the next big thing with teenagers in Southeast Asia

Do you know what the top free app in the Singapore App Store is right now? Go on, guess. WhatsApp? Uber? Facebook Messenger? Probably Pokemon Go? All solid guesses – and that last one is already wreaking havoc in the charts.

But according to SimilarWeb, up until a few days ago, before the pocket monster rampage landed, the number one spot was claimed by Bigo Live – a live-streaming video app made by a Singaporean team.

Bigo Live Broadcasting launched in March 2016 and is available on iOS and Android. At first glance, it’s not much different from live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat.

Periscope and Bigo’s interfaces share a lot of similarities, in fact:

Periscope (left) and Bigo’ user interfaces look very similar.

Yet Bigo just seems to resonate a lot more with young people in Southeast Asia.

Users range from teenagers to twentysomethings and the broadcasts mostly feature them going about their lives, just with a camera pointed at them. Conversations go on between users and the broadcaster.

The desire to spontaneously share details about your life that drives millennial juggernaut Snapchat – and, consequently, the desire of others to witness that – looks like a key factor to Bigo’s appeal.

The content runs the gamut from surprisingly mundane to mildly racy. In a stream from Vietnam, a girl is eating noodles while watching TV. A guy who looks like he’s at a retail store job is playing loud music and staring at his phone screen. Some streams, especially from Thailand, tend to get a little cleavagey. Unsurprisingly, those accounts get showered with virtual gifts.

The broadcasts run the gamut from surprisingly mundane to mildly racy.

Both versions of the app are consistently in the top 20 apps used in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos – a little less so in Malaysia, but still cracking SimilarWeb’s top 50 for those countries. App Annie’s stats also show a rapid increase of activity in the past month.

Bigo is a Singapore-based team, describing itself as a “fast-growing internet company” working on “video broadcast and VoIP-related products and services all over the world.” It claims to own over 40 patents in VoIP and video technology. Besides the live-streaming app, it also offers a telecommunications product that enables free international calls and messaging over the internet.

What do you do with it?

So what goes on in there?

But why is it so popular?