Bondee: Bound to End

By Ayanna Dezyrein Zoleta

Bondee racked up 5 million downloads on Google Play in less than a month. However, creating comical avatars and building dreamy rooms in a virtual world is not enough to make the once excited users stay.

Students in Manila hopped in and jumped out of the app in a span of a month. Even university Facebook groups were once flooded with qr codes of people’s Bondee accounts.

#RIPBondee has been trending on different social media platforms over the past few days as users seem to have grown tired of the app.

Twitter user @kobeesn said “I deleted my Bondee account and uninstalled the app. #RIPBondee”

Weeks before the downfall of the app, social media users’ Instagram and Facebook stories were flooded with their unique Bondee QR codes as they sought virtual neighbors to connect and hangout with them in the cyber community.

Unfortunately, the hype died out of nowhere. Nothing catastrophic or absurd took place— the users simply left the app.

Meh

“Boring” might be the most accurate word to describe the platform after you have finished dressing up your character and spicing up your room.

“I enjoyed the app the first time I downloaded it. Pero habang tumatagal… parang wala na kong magawa sakanya… Paulit-ulit lang and I noticed that my friends weren’t active on it na rin. It got boring after a while talaga. I deleted it after a week,” said Patricia Virata, a Dela Salle University Student, describing why she decided to quit Bondee.

@NoypiGeeks on Facebook

There are not a lot of interesting things to do on the app. It was all fun when it peaked as Filipinos shared witty room designs on social media platforms— with rooms turned into water stations, fast food restaurants, classrooms, churches and even renowned businesses. Users lived vicariously through their little Bondee characters.

Shortly after designing their rooms and visiting their friends’ rooms, there is simply nothing left to do on the platform.

Metaverse curse

When users first downloaded Bondee, styling their avatars with Gen-Z and aesthetic clothing was definitely the main selling point that caught their attention. However, finding out that the app is a part of the Metaverse raised concerns for many users.

The Metaverse app uses an in-game currency called B-Beans which allows users to to buy NFT (non-fungible token) items on the platform.

“I was scrolling on Twitter and I came across a tweet saying that Bondee is an NFT project, and I really didn’t know that it was one when I downloaded the app,” Kokomi Nomura, a tourism student of the University of Santo Tomas, described how she found out that the app is an NFT project.

NFTs are cryptographic tokens on the blockchain and these represent the ownership of digital or physical objects.

“I was shocked. I’m not really into the crypto space, but I’ve heard and read a lot about the environmental impacts of crypto and NFT. I’ve read somewhere that creating NFTs and crypto consumes a lot of energy, and I simply do not want to take part in that. I deleted the app right away after reading and verifying the tweet,” Nomura added.

Finding out that the app is an NFT project has been a deal breaker for some of the users, even though the version wherein the app offers NFT items is not yet available in the Philippines.

Flavor of the month

The hype on the app seemed to be short-lived, especially as there are not a lot of reasons to keep using the platform.

The early 2000s layout combined with social networking elements of Bondee was able to captivate the younger generation, but the developers would have to do much more than that to appease Gen Zs.