Although the mobile video sector is pretty hot these days, we’re not yet seeing many people in Japan share videos. So far they prefer to stick to photos, even on apps where video is readily available such as Instagram. In Japan, mobile game company Donuts is challenging this market with its new app called ‘Tomoracchi’, the name being a playful term that comes from the word ‘tomodachi’, meaning ‘friends’ in Japanese).

With Tomoracchi, users can take videos of up to six seconds and share them with friends. Do a long press on the screen and videos can be recorded, making the capture process easy and simple. The resulting short video can be decorated with funny anime-like or cute frames that resembles those on purikura machines. There are a total of 20 frames currently available, although we expect to see more later.

What differentiates this particular video app from competitors that its designed for videos to be shared privately. On Tomoracchi, users can share their videos with friends and families by sending a private URL. All the videos are saved on your iPhone, removing the user-registration process all together. There is also an option to share your videos on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or Line.

Donuts is a Japanese internet company that is known for the mobile game Boso Retsuden (a sort of a bike-gang battle game), its university student recruiting service Social Lunch, and its how-to website about love and relationships, How-Collect. Boso Retsuden is particularly popular with 39 billion monthly pageviews.

Tomoracchi can be downloaded for iOS, and is targeting one million users by the end of the year. Here is a video of a Japanese train that was taken using the app. Give it a try and let us know what you think!