The #34 French recipe app: two months, 1,000 installs, in a crowded category

Nyama is an iPhone recipe collection app from a small Paris studio that turns recipes seen on Instagram and TikTok into usable recipes with one tap. It appears at #34 in France's Food & Drink Top Grossing chart, which looks like traction in the French market. Digging deeper, two months after launch it has only 1,000 installs, and several French competitors 20 to 40 times its size already sit in the same category. Below: what that ranking is worth, where its users come from, why following it isn't worthwhile, and what its acquisition tactics are worth copying.

A post celebrating "1,000 people"

In 2026 Sep 27, Nyama's official Instagram posted: "Deux mois après le lancement, vous êtes 1 000 à avoir installé Nyama". Two months after launch, 1,000 people had installed it, and 2,507 recipes had been imported. The account had fewer than 400 followers at the time.

A month later, in Oct 30, someone in France left a 3-star review. She installed Nyama to compare it with the app she was using, and the first Instagram recipe wouldn't import because the post's caption had no recipe in it. "The other app had no problems. So I'm staying with my original app, even though it isn't perfect either."

Put these two things together and you have Nyama today: a thoughtfully made product with a small group of real users, but it's entering a category where users already have other options.

What it is

The developer, Winstell, is based in Paris and has only this one app on the App Store. It launched in 2026 Aug 10. The store page's first line reads: "You saved a recipe from a video, and three weeks later you can't find it."

The flow has five steps: send it an Instagram, TikTok or YouTube link, a recipe website, a photo of a cookbook page, or a block of text, and it extracts ingredients, quantities and steps; save them to your recipe book and tag them; drop them into a weekly plan; generate a shopping list automatically, sorted by supermarket aisle, that opens offline; then use cooking mode while you cook, one step per screen with the screen kept on. Quantities it's unsure of are flagged rather than invented, and data stays on the phone.

The French name is "mes recettes rangées" (my recipes, organized), and the English one is "Recipe Keeper & Planner", with search terms stuffed into the title. In three months it shipped 1.9.3 versions in five languages, and the website says an Android version is in development.

What the #34 Top Grossing ranking is worth

Not much. French Food & Drink is a small category with a low bar: on the same chart in Nov 6, #35 Jeannou had only 5 ratings, #36 CookShelf had zero, and #45 "Menu de la Semaine IA" had 7. Ranking 30 here probably takes only a few subscriptions a day (inferred).

Nyama's own numbers (App Store, 11-06): 131 ratings across all countries, of which 122 are in France and 9 in Belgium; the French storefront averages 4.6 stars. In early Oct France was still at 102 ratings (per 28), rising 18 in the last 7 days; on Nov 5 and 6 it added 5 each day, versus 0–3 a day before. Its Top Grossing rank has bounced between 20 and 122, its best being #20 on Oct 29; it has never charted on the overall chart.

One more detail: 131 ratings against 1,000-plus installs is close to a 10% rate, far above what typical apps get. It likely triggered an in-app rating prompt (inferred), which is why ratings grow more visibly than installs.

Where users come from

The official account makes AI short videos itself. Instagram @nyamaapp has posted a reel almost every day since early October, each labeled "Voix générée, écrans réels": the voiceover is AI-generated, the app screens are real screen recordings; some opening shots are also tagged "scène générée". The TikTok account @nyamapp6 has only 19 followers and 8 posts. Its Oct 2 and 3 photo posts got about 15k and 18k views, but only 4 likes, and the rest never reached 1,000 views. A gap that big between views and engagement looks like paid boosting (unverified).

One two-day TikTok test. In the TikTok ad library, advertiser Winstell ran only 25 ads, from Oct 9 to 10, targeting France only. Each ad had under 10k impressions and led to the App Store. Three copy variants were tested: "Arrête d'enregistrer tes recettes. Partage-les à Nyama" (Stop saving your recipes. Share them with Nyama), "100 recettes enregistrées, combien cuisinées ?" (100 recipes saved, how many cooked?), and "Ce soir, cuisine enfin la recette que tu as enregistrée" (Tonight, finally cook that recipe you saved). Nothing new after November. Looks like a small-budget test.

Hiring UGC creators to shoot product videos. In Oct 11, UGC creator @salome.creatrice.ugc posted a reel promoting Nyama, tagged "*Collaboration commerciale" (commercial collaboration). Accounts like this usually charge per post, and the footage can be reused as ad creative. Only this one was found.

No media coverage, and nobody has mentioned it on X in nearly 90 days. Its page didn't show up in the Meta ad library, but that doesn't mean it isn't advertising.

Who it's competing with

The pain point it targets is real: people screenshot and save recipes they scroll past, then can't find them when they want to cook. That's exactly why others already build for it. In Nov 6, the French Food & Drink Top Grossing chart's top 80 included at least a dozen apps doing "social video to recipe / recipe saving", with Nyama around #8 to #10:

Further down there are also Osta, CookGo, Miso, and CookNest, global saver apps with French localization, plus legacy one-time-purchase recipe tools like Paprika, Crouton, and Mela. Since August, more similar apps have launched in French-speaking markets (Manjo, Daily Bite). The idea that the French market is still empty doesn't hold.

Nyama's pitch, local-first, offline, not making up quantities, and making sure you actually cook what you save, is more thoughtful than most. But weekly meal plans and shopping lists are already covered by WeChef, GoomY, and ReciMe. And a 3-star review shows that at the most critical step, import, it's worse than the old apps people already have.

Where the money comes from

The free plan allows 5 imports a week, resetting on Mondays. Nyama Plus costs €4.99/month or €34.99/year, with a 7-day trial. The paywall comes after users are already hooked, and it's hard, so people complain with 1 stars: Sep 8, "C tjrs pareil, monts et merveilles pour ensuite te faire payer" (Same old story, sell you the moon and then make you pay), Oct 31, "à la fin on est bloqué si on paye pas" (in the end you're stuck if you don't pay).

The paywall complaints show that some users do reach the payment step. But based on chart thresholds, its subscription revenue is probably small (inference), and the exact figure isn't visible from outside.

If it were you

C. Don't follow it into the French recipe-saver niche. WeChef, GoomY, and ReciMe already run there, dozens of times its size, and Nyama is itself a late entrant with no clear differentiation. What's worth copying is how a small team got its first users with very little money.

Who it fits: indie devs who already have an app and want cheap first users in a non-English market. Or anyone with an idea that's clearly stronger at import, such as reading speech and visuals from video instead of relying on post text, targeting a language market with no local equivalent yet.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone planning an "Instagram / TikTok recipe saver" for big markets like France, the UK, Spain, Portugal, or Germany. ReciMe is spending heavily on ads there, and most already have one or two early players. A reskin with a translated name will most likely land at #8 to #10, like Nyama.

How to do it: before entering recipes, search the App Store in the target country's language and count how many similar apps are in the top 80 of the Top Grossing chart. If there are more than five, don't enter. If you do enter, focus only on import success rate, since that's the one thing users will compare. That 3-star review decides whether an app stays based on whether the first link imports.

How to get users: follow Nyama's approach, which costs very little. Run an official account posting one short video a day in the local language, using AI voiceover and real screen recordings. Spend a day or two and a few dozen euros testing three pain-point hooks on TikTok at once (saved but never cooked, can't find it, cook it tonight). Hire one or two per-post UGC creators to shoot footage, then boost the best. Use store titles with the words locals actually search for.

Timing: there's no hard deadline. This category doesn't depend on a one-off event, so the window won't suddenly close. But new similar apps launch every month, and it gets more crowded the longer you wait.

What would prove this read wrong: Nyama breaking into the French Food & Drink Top Grossing top 10 by 2027 January and holding there, or its weekly new ratings consistently catching up to GoomY (more than 100 per week over the last 7 days). That would show its brand and "you'll actually cook it" positioning works in French-speaking markets, and that late entrants still have room in this niche.