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ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, a new app called Peach took the internet by storm.

Peach, created by Vine founder Dom Hofmann, is a messaging platform that looks a bit like Twitter, Slack, and Instagram.

It effectively lets you find your friends and upload gifs, pictures, and status updates in your own feed, and then view your friends’ updates too.

One thing that makes Peach stand out is that it allows users to use “magic words” to summon certain commands to appear in their status updates.

For instance, if you type “gif,” a Giphy search tool appears. Typing “here” adds your current location. There’s a complete rundown of the app’s “magic words” here.

However just days ago Telegram – a faster, prettier, and more secure rival to WhatsApp – introduced similar capability.

The free, iOS-only app describes itself as a “fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself,” which is pretty vague, but Peach itself is strangely addicting. The internet went crazy for it on Friday — so much so that the app reportedly kept crashing.

Here’s how to use Peach:

This is Peach. Right now it’s an iOS-only messaging app.

When you first start out, you won’t have any friends on Peach. You’ll have to add them either by knowing their username or by entering their phone number (at the time of writing Irish numbers don’t seem to be supported, or the system is still experiencing glitches).

Here’s what your main screen in the Peach app looks like once you add some friends. You’re shown reverse-chronological updates from your friends, starting with the most recent.

Swipe to the left and you’ll be shown your own feed, which comprises all your updates — things like pictures you can upload, gifs, plain-text statuses, and more.

You can take pictures right inside the app, or upload one of your own.

You can also answer one of Peach’s prompts to update your profile.

And you can use Peach’s “magic words” — like the word “gif” — to summon hidden features, like finding a gif on Giphy.

Similar to how you can scroll through your own Peach profile, you can look through your friends’ too.

You can look at your friends’ friends.

In your activity panel (a heart in a square in the top left of your profile), you can see the posts of yours that your friends have liked and commented on.

This might be Peach’s best feature. Instead of poking people (remember that Facebook feature?) you can elect to wave to your friends, blow them a kiss, or cake them. It’s pretty addicting.

- Maya Kosoff