A Frenchman posts one push-up screen recording a day, three months later 70k installs: Shaply and the crowded "push-up battle"

Shaply is a push-up app made by a French indie developer: you prop your phone on the floor, the camera counts your reps, and the count turns into damage in battles. It didn't invent the mechanic. It just rode the wave in 2026's summer. It grew because the founder posted a screen recording to his own TikTok account almost every day. Below: how it got started, how crowded the category is now, and where you could still break in.

One 420k-view recording brought 17k installs in two days

In 2026 Oct 21, the TikTok account @shaply_app posted a 10-odd-second video with a single line of text, "You can see it?!": a person doing push-ups in front of a phone, with a 1v1 battle screen showing the count and rank ticking up. The video reached 425k views. That day Shaply gained roughly 5,300 more installs on Google Play, and the next day roughly 11,500 more (Google Play install figures, averaged across the gap between two observations).

It wasn't a one-off. In Oct 4, "Skill or spam?!" got 328k views and about +3,900 that day. In Oct 25, "Who can beat him?!" got 297k views and about +6,600. On ordinary days without a hit, it gained only a few hundred installs a day.

Cumulative Play installs went from roughly 17k in Oct 1 to 72,699 by Nov 5, with +10,654 over the last 7 days (the figures for August through early October are third-party estimates). Its best ranking was #10 on the Vietnam SPORTS Top Free chart in Oct 29, and on the same day #46 in Taiwan and #58 in Thailand. By Nov 6 it had dropped to #64 in Vietnam and #90 in Thailand, and Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, and France were all below #115. It has never charted in Top Grossing.

What it is

The first line of the store listing: "Shaply turns your push-ups into a game." Prop your phone in front of you, the camera reads your form and counts reps automatically, with a "range bar" beside it, so half a push-up doesn't count. There are three parts: 60-second real-time 1v1 battles, where you gain Elo and climb six ranks from "Recruit" to "Legend"; 8 maps to clear, each ending in a boss; and guilds. The biggest update, in Nov 6 1.1.0, added 8 maps, 8 bosses, and chests and gear.

Revenue comes from in-app purchases at $3.39–$18.99, and it's a subscription. During sign-up you fill in a pile of body data first, and only after that does the paywall appear.

It didn't start out like this

The Shaply developer is credited on the App Store as NOAH ROMAIN LAURENT CHANGEON. The founder story on the official site: he trained at home for a year, couldn't find an app that judged movement quality, so he built one himself.

In late July he pre-launched on TikTok in French: "SHAPLY, a fitness + aerobics + nutrition-analysis app, coming soon to iOS," directing people to sign up for a waitlist on the website. In Aug 1, one video got 400k views; in Aug 10, two more got 270k and 200k. It went live on Play in Aug 9 and on iOS in Aug 19. The pitch then was "AI counts your movements + photo-based nutrition analysis," and the site still says 23 exercises and "training and nutrition in one app."

From September the account switched to English, with content standardized into battle recordings and gym-culture tough-guy jokes ("The goat", "Stay hard"). Sep 17 "The goat" reached 5.06M views and 270k likes, but Android installs stayed at three or four hundred a day for those days, barely converting. (Inference: the product was still a French fitness tool then, so people who downloaded after seeing the video couldn't find what they'd seen.) By October the store listing had changed to "Turn push-ups into a game," with nutrition pushed to the back. It went from a French fitness tool to a push-up battle game, and only after that pivot did the viral videos start driving installs.

Why this mechanic: someone else validated it first

"Camera counts push-ups + boss fights" had already worked on short video before Shaply's pivot:

• Push Up Arena went live on iOS in May, with the mechanic "do a push-up, hit the monster once."
• Pushup RPG (Kazakh indie developer Yerasyl Amanbek) went live on iOS in late June. In Aug 31 it issued a press release saying that about two months after launch on iOS and Android it had passed 100k installs, and a single video topped 2M views.
• In May 9, a startup-hype account on Instagram used this kind of app as a case study: "This app got 2.9M views from screen recordings alone. Go build one."

Apps like this grow well from screen recordings for a simple reason: the visual is instantly understood. A person doing push-ups, a health bar draining, a rank climbing, needs no narration and no on-camera host to explain the product. Shaply's founder posted videos like this 5 times in 142 months. The account has 5,890 followers and 453k total likes. Most videos got only ten to twenty thousand views, but every so often one went big and brought a wave of installs. The cost was close to zero.

One more factor: most installs came from the SPORTS Top Free charts in countries like Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mexico, where a few thousand installs is enough to land in the top 100. Ratings are only 0.24% of installs, and 1-star ratings make up six in ten. That pattern suggests cheap traffic is involved: maybe paid buying, maybe TikTok pushing the videos into Southeast Asia. There's no direct evidence either way (inference).

Users don't stick: 2.4 rating

Play has 175 ratings, averaging 2.4. 1-star ratings number 105, 4-star and 5-star ratings are 35 each, and there are no 2 or 3-star ratings (11-04). The iOS US store has 7 ratings, averaging 1.6. Similar products sit at 4.5–5.0.

The reviews raise three complaints. One user gave 4 stars: "1v1 counting is inaccurate. I did 10 fast, clean reps and it only counted 4 or 5." Another said "1v1 is all bots, I haven't met a single real player." A third (10-19) wrote: "You make you create an account and fill in a bunch of data before the subscription pops up. I get that you need to charge, but say so up front, or make it clear in your Instagram videos."

The videos brought people in; the product didn't hold them.

Who's competing: the category is already crowded

After Pushup RPG's press release in late August, a batch of copycats launched in 9 and October, including some big developers. Shaply is one of the copycats that has done reasonably well, but its growth over the last 7 days (+10.7k) now trails two rivals that launched later.

What you can learn is the playbook, not the category

What Shaply really offers is a cold-start playbook a single person can run:

• Before launch, build a waitlist with short videos in your native language (its three French videos from 7–August each got 20–400k views, seeding the first batch of users).
• After launch, post one 10–30-second app recording a day, with jokes the niche already knows, no narration, no face on camera. Most posts make no splash, but one going viral every so often is enough.
• What's in the video has to match what people see after download. The September video with 5.06M views brought no installs. After the October pivot, a video with 300k views could bring thousands.

If it were you

C. The "sport as game + daily screen recordings" playbook is worth copying, but the "push-up battle" category isn't worth following right now.

Verdict: the mechanic was validated in May, made public by a press release in August, and 9–October saw a flood of copycats plus a screen-recording giant entering. Shaply is itself a copycat, its growth comes in waves, its rank is falling, and its rating is 2.4. Build another push-up 1v1 and you're the tenth or fifteenth.

Who it suits: a 1-person team that can do pose recognition and is willing to post short videos every day, or anyone who has another "instantly understandable screen recording" topic and wants to borrow this cold-start playbook.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone trying to make "yet another push-up battle game"; anyone unwilling to post videos themselves and hoping the store alone will bring organic traffic; anyone who wants to monetize through the paywall first (half the negative reviews in this category come from the paywall and bot opponents).

How to do it: don't copy push-ups. Take the same camera counting and apply it to a movement or audience nobody has turned into a game yet: squats, planks, jump rope, or home training for older adults, or fitness-test prep for students. Or focus on what Shaply does poorly: real-time PvP (even if only at fixed evening hours), accurate counting, and a paywall that explains itself up front.

How to get users: Follow Shaply's playbook. Post a screen recording on your own TikTok every day, with a person moving and the on-screen numbers ticking up in the first second. Before launch, build a waitlist with native-language videos. The Southeast Asia and LatAm category charts have low bars, and a few thousand installs can put you in the top 100, which makes them useful early exposure.

When to launch: Novelty fades fast on short video for this kind of content, so ship the new-action or new-audience version before the 2027 January fitness season (New Year's resolutions). That's the best window of the year.

Signs you're reading it wrong: ① After 1.1.0, Shaply's rating climbs back above 4 and its 7-day growth goes back over 20k. That would mean late entrants can still catch up on product quality and the category isn't saturated. ② A new push-up battle app launches after December and passes 100k installs within a month. That would mean demand is far from used up. ③ The reverse: if RepChamp and Pushup Legends both see their 7-day growth halve before year-end, the whole trend is fading, and even the new-action version needs more caution.

Data and sources

• Google Play store page, install counts, category chart rank and rating distribution, recorded daily from 2026-10-29 to 11-06. Install counts from August to early October are third-party estimates (AppstoreSpy).
• App Store listing info and ratings: public iTunes API, 11-06.
• TikTok @shaply_app videos, views and likes, pulled via 11-06. Install jumps lining up with videos is a timing match, not attribution.
• Official site shaply.app/en (11-06); Google Play review text (8-20, 8-26, 10-19).
• Pushup RPG press release (EINPresswire / Tennessean, 2026-08-31); competitor install counts from Google Play, early November.
• No public info on ad spend or revenue. Where the text says "inferred," it is an inference.