With its second app, Amo wants to make photo sharing as simple as taking a photo

Less than three weeks ago, French startup Amo released ID. As I hinted in my article covering this much-anticipated launch, ID was Amo’s first idea. Today, the social consumer startup is releasing its second app, called Capture.

Once again, this new app will be dissected by social app enthusiasts and other companies working in this space because Amo was co-founded by 10 veterans in the industry who cut their teeth on Zenly, the location-sharing app that was acquired by Snap, grew to become one of Europe’s biggest social apps with 18 million daily active users and then was shut down by Snap.

Amo’s first app ID is all about creating (and browsing) highly personalized profile pages. It’s a visual take on social networks with a sense of depth and space that doesn’t restrict you to a 3×3 grid of photos. Capture is something completely different.

“It’s the thing that I’ve been the most obsessively thinking about for the past 12 years of my life. They all make photo apps and I use other photo apps every day. Why can’t I make one myself? How would I do it?” Amo co-founder Antoine Martin told me a few weeks ago.

Capture is a radically different photo-sharing app. As the name suggests, calling it a photo-sharing app isn’t even fair as Amo spent more time thinking about capturing photos than looking at other people’s photos. It’s a fun and straightforward take on the smartphone camera that takes advantage of many of the sensors in your phone.

When you open the app, Capture immediately starts with a viewfinder of your camera. There’s a big shutter button in the middle, and some smaller icons next to it.

Capture is a camera app — and it’s social. It is meant to be used as a way to capture photos in just a few seconds, without having to think about it, just like you take photos with the iPhone’s default camera app.

When you take a photo, nothing happens. There’s no preview screen, no action buttons, nothing.

“Consumption takes a back seat, you don’t land into a feed. It’s a creation-first app, and that’s really what it’s all about,” Martin said. “If I’m walking in the street and I see a Space Invader that I like, I just capture it, I’m there, I take a photo, I turn off my phone, it’s in my pocket. I don’t spend minutes looking at the preview.”

In the background, the photos that you take with Capture are saved to your photo library and are shared with your Amo friends. There’s no need to think about what you should share or not and who you should share your photos with. Every photo that you take with Capture is shared.

A personal camera

A piece of content in Capture isn’t just a photo. By default, when you tap on the big shutter button, Capture saves two photos — what you see in the viewfinder and a wide-angle photo.

There are smaller buttons in the app that are essentially other photo modes. The smiley face lets you capture a frontback — what you see and a selfie. The third button is a superzoom mode that captures a handful of photos that are more and more zoomed in.

These features let you augment your photos with context. They could also be considered as artistic tools or opportunities to have fun.

But when you look at your friends’ photos, you only see a photo and that’s it. This time, Capture takes advantage of the accelerometer to turn a static photo into an animated image. You tilt your phone forward and backward to reveal the wide-angle shot, the selfie or the zoomed-in photos.

Just like with ID, Amo has integrated a ton of haptic effects so that you can actually feel the app as it slightly vibrates in your hand when you tilt your phone forward and backward. It’s an imaginative interaction gesture and it works extremely well.

One thing I’ve noticed when people started talking about Capture is that they say “grab my phone” because it’s easier to explain the app once the other person can move the device in their hand.

Here’s a video that explains what I mean (haptic feedback not included):

Romain Dillet

Senior Reporter

Romain Dillet was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch until April 2025. He has written over 3,500 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, AI, fintech, privacy, security, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With thirteen years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry — his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover Revolut, Alan and N26. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.

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