There’s a somewhat new app on the market: Amino.  It isn’t as popular as Snapchat or Instagram, but it has just as much potential, and perhaps even more.

Amino is a group of apps about different topics. The full incubator app is called Amino: Communities and Chats. It houses thousands of different communities, where fans with different interests can post, role play, chat, or share.  These communities range from My Little Pony to Anime; even Doctor Who or Pretty Little Liars. There are also  communities based on hobbies like baking, photography, art, and fashion.

For those who enjoy role play, or just for those people who need to escape from reality for a while, Amino is perfect. There are great roleplaying communities like Virtual Space (the most popular), Virtual World, Magica High, and many more. To roleplay, users first create what is called an OC (original characters/own character). Some people get pictures off of Google or they draw their own. The user can then assign that character personality traits and physical characteristics. They then have a character with which to role play.

Additionally, there are communities for many animes, like Naruto, the Dragon Ball franchise, Tokyo Ghoul, and many more.

Functioning and navigating through the app is quite easy. Once users opens the app, they start on a screen showing all the communities they are in. There is also a tab called Explore, so users can explore different communities of different topics. The other tab is called Create, which gives users a link to an app where they can create their own community. When a user enters a community, it will automatically take them to the Front Page, which shows blog posts of the members that are in the community. It also features the, well, featured posts, or posts that are popular or important.

There are four tabs near the top of the screen: Following, Front Page, Public Chats, and Latest. Following shows the user posts of all the people who they are following. The Public Chats feature shows all chats that exist. Anyone can join a public chat. A user can also create a group chat with a group of people, but only the people invited can join it. A private chat, or a one-to-one chat is for two people only. Someone can only invite someone to a chat if they are following them. Latest shows a user all the newest posts without the featured items.

With the newest update (so far available for Android only), at the very top of the screen there are three items. The name of the community, a speech bubble, and the user’s profile picture. If they tap the speech bubble, it shows them all of the chats they are in. If the user taps their profile picture, or just swipes the screen to the right, it will show a menu. At the top, there is exit, which takes them back to the main screen, the name of the community, and a search button, where you can search for posts or members. Underneath is the user’s  profile picture, name , and their ranking. The ranking counts on the user’s reputation and how long they spend on the community. The ranking is only in the new Android update.

In the middle of the screen, there are three big buttons. News Feed, Public Chats, and Catalog. Not all communities have a catalog. Catalog shows a user all the favorite posts that exist. News feed shows them blog posts that have been created, and public chats shows them public chats.

Underneath those three are six smaller buttons. My Chats shows the user all of the chats they are in, Notifications shows them if someone replied to a comment they’ve made, followed them, or liked something of theirs. Members shows them all leaders, curators, and regular members of the community. Bookmarks shows them posts that they have bookmarked to read later. Leaderboards shows them rankings: who’s the most active in the last twenty four hours, in the last seven days, and of all time. Compose brings up six more buttons: Blog, Link, Favorite, Poll, Question, and Public chat.

A Blog Post is where someone can “share your thoughts and ideas, write a review, post pictures and GIFS, and more”. A Link is where someone can “share news or articles from other websites to get the community’s thoughts and comments”.  A Favorite is where someone “can create mini profiles for your favorite things”. Many people use these to create their OC’s. A Poll is where someone “can use multiple choice to get opinions from the community”. A Question is where someone “can ask and get opinions from the community”. A Public chat is where someone can create a chat to have real-time conversations with other people.

A great feature about Amino is that a user doesn’t have to have only one profile. On every community, users can have a different name and different profile picture and change them as many times as they would like. Users can even use GIFs for thier profile pictures.

Overall,  Amino is quite easy to use and fun to go on. It has five stars on both the Appstore and the Playstore.

If anyone ever needs a hand with navigating the app or a friendly face to start off with, just send a chat request to Sakkura Jade on anime and roleplay communities, or Arekusandora on normal/life communities.