Pocket is designed around lightweight experiences that take advantage of smartphone hardware and media. Creations can react to touch or the movement of a phone, incorporate sound effects and include clips from songs. Users can also bring in images stored on their devices or give a creation access to the camera.
Once published, a gizmo appears on the creator’s profile and can circulate through Pocket’s scrollable feed. Other users can interact with it directly or use it as the basis for their own version, giving the app both game-creation and social-sharing components.
Pocket adds another format to Meta’s growing collection of experimental AI creation products. The company has already introduced tools for generating images through the Meta AI app and has experimented with AI-created video through Vibes.
The company has also released several stand-alone apps in recent months. Those include Instagram Instants, Forum for Groups and Seller for Marketplace, alongside an AI bedtime stories experiment. Meta also introduced a Meta AI app for Mac this week.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has connected that faster product-development cycle to the use of AI in software development. During Meta’s July earnings call, he told analysts that AI was making it easier for the company to develop and test additional applications. “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,” Zuckerberg said. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.”
Pocket applies that experimentation to AI-generated interactive software rather than limiting generative tools to images or videos. Instead of requiring users to build a game manually, the app turns a natural-language prompt into an experience that can use features already available on a phone.
The decision to make those creations remixable also gives Pocket a collaborative layer. A game does not have to remain a finished creation from a single user; other people can save it, redistribute it or modify it into something new.
Pocket’s broader U.S. availability now moves the product beyond its initial Brazil test while bringing Meta’s work with the former Gizmo team into its own stand-alone app. At the same time, the shutdown of Gizmo consolidates that work around Pocket as Meta continues experimenting with AI-generated consumer experiences.
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Images courtesy of Meta.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
