Product Hunt Weekly Digest
April 21st, 2024

YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

Hi, hi! It’s Monday and it’s Earth Day! Don't miss the Cat Nips section below for innovative products in the renewable energy space.

But first, ICYMI: Makers worldwide are hosting their own Product Hunt meetups on May 2nd. RSVP to one in your city or even host your own.

Now, here's last week's top news...

😬 Remember the Humane AI pin? MKBHD reviewed it.

📹 Adobe is working on generative video but it won’t reveal when it will launch.

🎫 TikTok is giving users more ways to purchase event tickets in-app.

🧑‍⚖️ But the US House has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok.

🍎 Apple has removed Threads and WhatsApp from the Chinese app store.

🐦 According to Elon, X will start charging new users to post.

👻 Snapchat is adding watermarks to content generated with its AI tools

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT
Can this new voice-first app carve out a piece of the social networking market?

If you think of Clubhouse (the asynchronous voice-based chat room app that took off in the early days of the pandemic), and combine it with the serendipity of Twitter’s timeline, you’ll start to get the idea behind Airchat, the latest social app on everyone’s lips. 

Originally hacked together last year, Airchat is built by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder executive Brian Norgard. They then rebuilt the app for both iOS and Android and recently launched it. To say it took social media by storm would be putting it lightly. 

At the time Airchat was invite-only, but all the hype overwhelmed the app, and the team temporarily closed the doors in full. On Saturday, Naval posted on X that the app was open again, this time to all US and EU users with no invitation needed.

When you first open Airchat, you’ll notice that messages automatically start playing. From there, you can scroll a timeline filled with people sharing their thoughts, and you can quickly interact by replying in your voice, liking a note, and even reposting ones to your own profile. 

It’s not really limited to just voice, either. You can swap between voice and video messages, and you can even add images to your post after the fact. Still, most people are zoned in on the voice chat functionality, given the tagline “a social walkie-talkie.” 

One of the more interesting quirks is that voice notes automatically play at 2x the normal speed. I imagine this is to make it easier for users to consume and interact with more content, especially since the app lends itself to voice-led essays quite well. This was okay for me, but if it feels unnatural to you, you can reset the speed by holding down the play button. 

Social is a hard market to break through. Over the last half-decade we have so many new takes on connecting people come and go with varying degrees of influence left over. Will Airchat be any different? It’s hard to tell. What do you think? 

Check out Airchat
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    CAT NIPS

    Top News

    • The team behind Rewind launched Limitless, an AI Pendant.
    • Meta launched Lllama 3, its largest suite of AI models to date.
    • Nothing launched a new set of colorful, AI-enabled earphones.
    • HuggingFace launched a chatbot app for iOS.

    Makers Corner

    • Neon is like Postgres but with a serverless architecture.
    • Reflex lets you build entire web apps just by using Python.
    • Unlogged is an open source tool for mocking, testing, and optimizing apps.

    Earth Day 🌎

    • Climatize is a platform to invest in solar projects.
    • Sounds Right lets nature earn royalties for its sounds on Spotify.
    SHOUTOUTS

    Looking for a beautiful component library to help build your app? Makers on Product Hunt have been shouting-out Shadcn UI for being a huge help in building their products. Here’s what a few makers had to say:

    “The best way to create the cleanest UI in seconds.”
    AutoRepurpose, YouTube vid to threads generator 🎥

    “...Allowing us to build a clean and efficient UI.”
    Ticket Hero, Event ticket price comparisons 🎫

    “Unmatched in facilitating the creation of beautiful, user-friendly interfaces.”
    PowerNote, AI day-summarizer 📝