Meta Pocket App Rolls Out in US, Letting Users Create and Share AI-Generated Games Called Gizmos

Meta brings Pocket, an app that lets you vibe-code and share games, to US users

Meta's experimental vibe-coding gaming app, Pocket, is now rolling out to everyone in the U.S. The app, which arrived quietly last month in the test market of Brazil, allows people to generate small, interactive games using AI prompts, which are published to a scrollable feed. Based on Meta's acqui-hire of the team at the vibe-coded gaming platform Gizmo earlier this year, these games -- or "gizmos" as they're called -- respond to touch and the tilt of your phone, play sound effects, and can include clips of your favorite songs. They can also use photos from your camera roll or access your camera. The resulting games can then be shared on your profile, where others can save them, remix them into other creations, or simply repost them. The app is the latest example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools mainstream, following its earlier efforts that included making AI-generated images with its Meta AI app as well as AI videos created with an experimental app called Vibes. Pocket now joins these and several other standalone mobile applications from Meta in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has credited the increased output to AI-enabled software development, which makes it faster for the company to test and ship new ideas. "Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a stand-alone Groups app, and Seller, a stand-alone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps," he told analysts on July's earnings call. "So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them." In addition to Instants, Forum, and the Seller app, Meta has shipped an experiment involving AI bedtime stories, and this week, a Meta AI app for Mac.

Meta's New Vibe Coding App Helps You Make Tiny, AI-Generated Minigames

A new basic vibe coding app from Meta, designed to help you use its AI tools to make small, interactive minigames, is now available in the US. Meta Pocket first launched in July for a brief testing period in Brazil, but it's now available to anyone in the US to make, play, and share short interactive experiences. Meta refers to these light minigames as "gizmos". Described by Meta as "a small interactive experience you can tap and touch," gizmos are tools you'd likely play around with for a couple of minutes at most. For example, Meta's marketing shows one experience that uses a photo of a flower as a paintbrush. Gizmos are built using Meta's AI models, which you can prompt until you create the perfect experience. Pocket can use the tilt of your phone, your touch screen, sound effects, songs you upload, or any photos you add to the creator to power the experiences. You can play other people's gizmos and even remix them to add your own components. Don't like the flower photo the original creator used? Upload your own instead. The app includes a feed where you can browse other people's creations within playlists. You can download Meta's Pocket app now on iOS and Android. It's unclear when the app will come to other markets outside Brazil and the US, or whether Meta intends to offer it elsewhere. Pocket is based on Meta's previous acquisition of an app called Gizmo, which made similar interactive experiences. Meta shut down the app after it was purchased, rebuilding the tools into its own branded experience, likely built to encourage users to try Meta AI for themselves and share creations across its social media platforms.

Meta's app for creating generative AI minigames is now available in the US - Engadget

It's called Pocket and is described as a "platform for making and sharing gizmos." Meta's little vibe-coding app Pocket has now arrived in the US after a brief testing phase in Brazil. The app lets people generate minigames, called gizmos, via prompts. The games get published to a scrollable feed, bringing in a social media component. Users can save gizmos to a favorites list and repost gizmos to their feed. These games make full use of the capabilities available in modern smartphones. They can respond to both touch and tilt and can include photos and even songs. Once saved to a profile, other people can remix them into unique creations. They are called gizmos instead of minigames for a couple of probable reasons. First of all, they aren't just games. The marketing advertises simple experiences like a canvas to paint on. Also, Meta hired nearly the entire team behind an app called, well, Gizmo. This led to the app shutting down. Gizmo was basically the same thing as Pocket and even used similar nomenclature (referring to the creations as gizmos). In any event, Pocket is available right now and it's free. It could be worth a download and a couple of minutes before getting bored. This is just the latest AI-forward move that Meta has made. Last year, the company launched a feature for the Meta AI app called Vibes that's basically a feed for AI slop. Facebook also recently introduced the ability to tweak profile photos with AI-powered animations.

U.S. users can now vibe-code and share mini-games with Meta's Pocket app

Pocket lets almost anyone turn a game idea into something playable and share it with friends Vibe-coded games and apps have already flooded Android and iOS storefronts, creating plenty of frustration among users trying to sort through them. Meta is taking a different route with Pocket, its experimental app for turning simple ideas into small, playable experiences that can be shared like social posts. Pocket itself is not entirely new. We first covered the app when Meta quietly began testing it in Brazil in July. It is now rolling out across the U.S., giving a much larger group of users a chance to try it. Pocket treats games more like social posts Meta calls the creations inside Pocket "gizmos." Users can describe an idea in natural language, let AI build a playable version, and then continue tweaking the result before sharing it. These experiences are generally much smaller in scope than conventional mobile games. A gizmo can respond to taps, swipes, dragging, and phone movement, while some can also use music, sound effects, photos, the camera, or microphone. That smaller scale is also what makes Pocket interesting. Someone with no development experience could turn an inside joke, quiz, strange game idea, or simple challenge into something playable without learning Unity, Unreal Engine, or a programming language. Recommended Videos People can discover gizmos inside Pocket, repost them, or remix them when the creator allows it. Shared links can also be opened without Pocket installed, making these creations much easier to pass around among friends than a traditional mobile game. This may be a better home for vibe coding Pocket builds on Meta's acquisition of the team behind Gizmo, another platform focused on AI-generated interactive experiences. According to Business Insider, Pocket runs on Meta's Muse Spark model and does not currently include direct messages. Meta also told the publication that it has no plans at the moment to integrate Pocket with Instagram or its other apps, so this remains a separate experiment for now. Vibe coding has made it easy for almost anyone to turn a small idea into an app or game, and app stores are becoming increasingly crowded as a result. Pocket gives those smaller experiments a more natural home. Instead of worrying about coding, app-store submissions, or building a full mobile game, ordinary users can use Meta's AI-powered canvas to turn a simple idea into something playable, see what works, and share it with friends without every experiment becoming another standalone download.

Meta's new social media app swaps photos and reels for your own AI-generated video games

While everyone was debating the new Instagram logo, Meta quietly dropped an entirely new social media app called Pocket and it leans even harder into AI. Where Instagram has posts and reels, Pocket delivers a feed of 'gizmos' - AI-generated mini games and digital toys that users can generate and then share via the app. Vibe coding has taken off big time in the past year. While the open-source game engine Godot banned AI coding in an attempt to protect the sanity of its maintainers, Pocket aims to tap into the trend and allow anyone to quickly generate a basic game using a text prompt. Meta briefly tested Pocket in Brazil last month and has now launched the app via the iOS App Store and Android Play Store in the US. Its users aren't going to be creating GTA VI, but they can generate small quizzes, puzzles and mini challenges without having to know code or learn the best game development software. The name 'gizmo' gives a good idea of the level of sophistication the games have. They can make use of gestures like taps, swipes and phone movement as well as camera and audio input. After a user generates a game, they can save it and share it via the app. That's where the Instagram-like social mechanic kicks in. Users can scroll through a feed of other people's generations. They can play them but also repost them and remix them. The word 'gizmo' was inherited from a previous AI mini-game app of the same name developed by Atma Sciences. Meta licensed the technology and hired the company's team. Pocket's generative AI is powered by Meta's Muse Spark model. Meta's taken a leaf out of Google's playbook in releasing a wave of experimental projects in recent months. It also has Forum, an app built around Facebook Groups designed as a Reddit-style discussion platform, the Snapchat-inspired Instants, which works both as part of Instagram and as a standalone app, Seller for Meta marketplace sellers and Vibe for AI video generation. Like these, Pocket is experimental for now as the company susses out interest, apparently now opting for lower-stakes projects after some questionable investments in the past. This is the company that renamed itself after a product that never really materialised and now think that people will want to wear its 'pervert glasses'. OpenAI also had a go at launching a generative AI social media app in the form of Sora for video. It lasted six months.