Ryosuke Matusmoto 
Yukari Mitsuhashi
The purikura photo app ‘Decopic’ is one of the many apps that has won hearts of young ‘kawaii-hunters’ in Japan (‘kawaii’ meaning ‘cute’ in Japanese). Readers may recall that we previously put this app on our popular list of Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps. Community Factory, the company behind the app, has just announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of 30 million downloads worldwide. That’s a whopping 20 million downloads in the span of about a year, since it was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in last September. In addition to Decopic, the company released six more apps this year alone.
Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.
Community factory describes Decopic (available on both iOS and Android) as “so cute that it makes you happy just to have it.” It’s super easy to use with no need for instructions.
Many users of the app are from Asia such as Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand. There is a growing fan base in these countries, especially a strong community in Taiwan.
According to Ryosuke Matusmoto, the CEO of Community Factory, many of their apps are downloaded by users outside of Japan even when only provided in Japanese. This is likely due to their simple user interface which effectively removes the language barrier. All the apps share the common qualities of being cute as well as offering many fun designs within one application, so users of one app by Community Factory are likely to download another.
Ryosuke elaborates on the recent milestone:
In addition to our growing user base in Asia, we saw younger Japanese girls, as young as middle school downloading our app. They probably got their first mobile phone, which is now almost always a smartphone and not a feature phone. We continue to focus on girls, and how much of their mobile time we can take up. We released six new apps this year, and plan to develop more in different categories. Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.
Decopic reaches out to many female users, and then other apps such as calendar or battery-efficiency apps provide utilities that enhances the app’s retention. Their collage app Petapic had five million downloads after eight months of its release, and Petat Calendar had one million downloads as of May of this year.
