Measures steps, but you can pelt your friends with banana peels: how Stompers got 70k Android installs

A step-counting app got 70k installs on Google Play in three months. It's not new: the iOS version launched two years ago and has 14.8k ratings in the US store, and Android friends could never be added. This piece covers what makes it fun, why it's taking off on Android now, how it makes money, and why the comment with tens of thousands of likes is an opportunity left for you.

A 9-second video

Oct 4, 2026, a TikTok account called @jocelynwalking posted a 9-second vertical video captioned only "I'm way too competitive for this." The account had a few thousand followers at the time, and its bio read "Stompers ambassador." By Nov 6 the video had 4.58M views, 378k likes, and 153k shares (TikHub, 11-06).

The top comment has 26.5k likes:

"Any middle-aged women with a bit of a belly who want to join my group? I don't want to be stuck with all the young, fit girls 😂"

The second comment, 18.6k likes: "This might actually work on me, I'm super competitive." The third, 10.9k likes: "Who wants to add me? I just downloaded it."

Three days later, on Oct 7, Stompers' cumulative Google Play installs jumped about 8,000 in a single day (AppstoreSpy estimate). For the month before, it was adding only a few hundred to a thousand or two a day. The timing lines up, but there's no attribution data, so this is an inference.

What it is: Mario Kart for walking

You play one round a day, comparing that day's steps with friends who've added you. On the road you can pick up power-ups: banana peels make opponents slip, baseball bats knock people back, and rockets speed you up. Results are posted at 9 p.m. The characters are a crew of wobbly inflatable people, with art by Jim Soper, who drew characters for Hell's Kitchen and Cuphead (The Verge, 2024-06).

The app is made by a three-person team: designer Soren Iverson (formerly of Cash App / Square, known on X and Threads for daily "unhinged UI" parody designs), engineer Josh Rozin, plus an animator. The iOS version launched on May 2024, 22, and by Nov 6 had 14,791 US-store ratings at 4.77 stars (App Store).

One five-star iOS review captures its magic specifically. A Florida girl installed it with her aunt, cousins, and sister, and on day one:

"We spent an hour weaving through the clothing racks at the mall and left without spending a cent... my sister hit me with a baseball bat and I wanted to hit her back with a real one... honestly, if not for this app we wouldn't be laughing like this today."

What keeps people around isn't self-discipline, it's the urge to beat your relatives.

Why now, and why Android

The Android version launched on Jul 2026, 13, and traffic picked up in late August. Users had been waiting a long time: people on Reddit were asking when Android would arrive back in 2024, and the official X account said in April 2026 it was building "Stompers 2 + Android." The help page states iOS and Android users can add each other as friends and compete together.

This is the first reason for the Android surge: for two years, a game that requires pulling in friends couldn't reach iPhone users' Android friends. When the door opened, the backlog of invitations was released all at once (an inference, but strong evidence: the countries charting on Android, the US, Australia, and the Philippines, are exactly iOS's core markets).

Source: AppstoreSpy estimate plus the Google Play page, 11-06. In the past 7 days it has added only 3,531, a few hundred a day, and growth is slowing.

The bulk of the action is still on iOS: US-store ratings grow by 64 to 165 a day, it was still ranked #99 in Health & Fitness in Nov 2, and in November it climbed to #24 and #25 on 5 and 6 (App Store). Extrapolating from the rating growth, iOS's new installs are far larger than Android's.

Where users come from: the official "walking influencers" the company runs itself

@jocelynwalking isn't an ordinary user who went viral by accident. Check her profile: 494 videos, about 3 a day, captions that loop the same few lines: "I'm way too competitive for this", "I need to lock in", "Not leaving until I'm in first place lol". Of the 9 posts from November 3 to 5, 7 got only one to five thousand views, and one got 298k (11-03, "It's lowkey the best motivation"). In October there were several more at 340k, 400k and 150k (TikHub, 11-06).

She isn't the only one. @anaswalks has "account owned by stompers" right in her bio and has posted 1,060 videos; there are also @chanwalks, @walkwithmaddie, and the hashtag #stomperspartner. The play is clear: run a batch of walking accounts that look like everyday girls' lives, post a lot every day, reuse the same captions, keep the cost per post near zero, and bet that the recommendation algorithm will occasionally push one to several million views. This playbook already produced a 200k-view hit in June 2024, and in October 2026 it ran into a 4.58M one.

Other channels:

• The product pulls in its own users: you can't play without adding friends, so every new user has to go recruit people. Under the viral videos it's all "add me" and "who's in", and some people have built their own Discord servers to add each other.
• Founder fame and press: at launch in 2024, Iverson's personal following got it coverage from The Verge and InsideHook (which called it a "summer surprise app"). Copycats don't get that.
• Paid ads: the third-party estimator Peekly shows it running 30 Meta ads (scale unverified).
• Store search: the Android title is "Step & Walk Counter", and the description is stuffed with pedometer, walking challenge and step counter, catching people searching for "pedometer".

Where the money comes from

Free to download, with paid tiers on two levels:

• Super Stompers subscription: from $4.99 a week to $59.99 a year. The core pitch is that steps taken after the 9 p.m. settlement, until midnight, still count. It sells you "three more hours of walking" right when the race anxiety peaks.
• Coin in-app purchases: single purchases from $0.99 to $99.99, for items and character outfits.

Peekly estimates iOS revenue at roughly $93k to $100k a month and about 100k downloads a month; both third-party, unverified. The company has never published revenue. On Android it has ranked between #90 and #103 on the US Health & Fitness Top Grossing chart (Google Play chart, 10-29 to 11-06).

How it charges money is also the main source of bad reviews. In the last month of iOS one-star reviews, the most common complaints were "said it was free, then found out it was a 7-day trial", "the trial charged me right away", and "tapped the weekly subscription and got charged for a year". Some people also noticed that only people who had tried the subscription see full-screen ads after it expires: "none of my dozen friends have seen an ad, only me". Starting in mid-October there were also several "ads now, uninstalling" posts. Another complaint is inaccurate step syncing and rankings that jump around before and after the 9 p.m. settlement: "refreshed at 9 and I was third, one minute later I'm fourth, is this fair" (App Store US reviews, 10-06 to 11-04).

Who it's competing with

"Comparing steps with friends" is already crowded. The fight is over leaderboards:

In two years I haven't seen anyone copy the "items + one daily match + head-to-head with people you know" combo and make it work.

The gap the comments point to

Go back to that 4.58M-view video and scroll the comments. Beyond "I'm competitive", the most-liked ones say something else:

"This kind of thing makes me wish I had friends 🥺" (1,245 likes) "I need this, but I'd be competing against moms and I don't have that much free time 😭" (636 likes) "Anyone aged 22 to 26 want to do this together? Doesn't have to be the same city, I just need motivation" (509 likes) "Any Indonesians want to do this? The loser buys everyone a Gojek coffee" (111 likes) "My friends all refused 🤣" (39 likes)

Stompers is built on the assumption that you already have a group of friends willing to download it. The people who want it most are the ones who don't: moms trying to lose weight after pregnancy, middle-aged women who don't want to compete with fitness girls, young people with few friends in their city, and people outside the US. The most-liked comment is essentially asking for "grouping by age and body type, competing with strangers", which Stompers doesn't offer. Users are left to find people in the comments and Discord themselves.

If it were you

One-line take: cloning Stompers into another "step-compete-with-friends" app doesn't pay. It has two years of social graph, very recognizable art, and a founder with name recognition. The opening is the half it skips: matching people up for games when they have no friends to invite, or bringing the same loop to languages and communities it ignores.

Who it fits: 1 to 2 people who can make character art that is slightly weird and funny (the hardest part to copy, beyond the mechanics), who understand a non-English market (Indonesia, the Philippines, Latin America, Brazil), or who are already in communities like mom groups or weight-loss groups.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone who just wants a cleaner step counter plus leaderboard (Pacer and the built-in phone features are free); anyone who can't handle syncing both Apple Health and Health Connect (half of Stompers' bad reviews are about inaccurate steps, and you'll trip on the same thing); anyone counting on App Store organic search to cold-start.

How to build it: copy the parts it has already validated: one daily match, scheduled evening settlement, items to sabotage others, and paid extensions to the scoring window plus items. Change the onboarding: auto-match each user into a group of 5 to 8 strangers by age bracket, body type, time zone, and labels like "new mom" or "50+", with groups rotating weekly. Launch iOS and Android on day one, so you don't make Android users wait two years like Stompers did. Make it clear the subscription is a trial. Don't copy its "trial first, silent charge later" approach, which is the biggest source of its one-star reviews.

How to get users: take its TikTok playbook directly. Run 5 to 10 "walking everyday life" accounts, with bios stating you're an official ambassador, 3 posts a day, reused captions, 9-second clips of walking plus screenshots of your rank in the app. Target the captions at the people in the comments: "can't find friends to compete with?", "only competing with moms my age". Under the videos, someone will naturally shout "add me", and that's the demand your product needs to catch.

When to start: January 2027 is the peak of "New Year weight loss". Get live in mid-December, start warming up accounts, and have a set of working videos ready before the first week of January.

Signs you've misread the opening: ① Stompers launches stranger matching or public groups in Q1 2027, and this half of the gap is gone; ② your matched groups retain at less than half the rate of friend groups in week two, meaning strangers can't sustain this kind of trash talk and the loop depends on existing relationships; ③ after running accounts for 30 days and posting 200 videos, none passes 100k views, meaning this playbook's window has closed, or the content doesn't work without Stompers' art.

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Data and sources: Google Play page and AppstoreSpy install estimates (08-30 to 11-06); App Store US ratings, category charts and reviews (as of 11-06); TikTok account videos and comment counts for @jocelynwalking and @anaswalks (TikHub, 11-06); The Verge (2024-06), InsideHook (2024-07), the stompers.com help pages, Reddit r/stompers, the official X account. Revenue figures are third-party estimates from Peekly, unverified. Anything marked "inferred" or "estimated" is an inference or estimate.