Kanvas 4.0.1

Kids these days...! Everything has to be about stickers, glitter, and instant chat. Any social network that doesn’t play ball is dead on arrival.

Case in point, Kanvas tries to juggle them all. Combining Twitter-like microblogging with Facebook-style posting and WhatsApp-inspired chat, this imagery-based social network has it takes to gain widespread attention. But the app is pure garbage.

Decent UI, lots of stock imagery

Kanvas admittedly looks good. When you first launch the thing, a cascade of previews intuitively shows you what the service is all about, so you can get started with supplying the network with your information (Facebook, email, or Kanvas account).

It will display a Push Notifications alert, and you’ll be scrolling through others’ Kanvases in no time. It’s iPhone bound, so you don’t get a web interface.

It looks at works a lot like Twitter, complete with a profile image and background theme, followers, likes, the works. The supplied imagery is of mixed quality.

Making a canvas isn't all that fun

Kanvas needs something from you before you can start posting. That is your Facebook account, an email address, or a Kanvas account. If you go with Facebook (something that most people will probably do), it will receive your public profile, friend list and email address.

Creating a canvas means you can add gifs and stills, annotate them, add stickers and text, overlays, etc. The creation process is not very intuitive, and the UI is non responsive at times.

The level of interaction with others is on the low (for now), but it’s easy to just pick someone to talk to instantly. This can be good if you have good intentions and the person on the receiving end doesn’t mind meeting new people like this. Or it can be bad in more ways than one and I don’t need to describe how.

Overall it’s a fun experience, but a none-responsive one with very little feedback from the community. Not something worth spending much time in if you don’t have all your friends already on Kanvas.

Kanvas further sports a GIF creation tool via the Burst camera feature, enabling users to capture a 6 frame animation of whatever it is they want. There’ also the possibility to shoot up to 15 seconds of video and adjust the playback speed to whatever level they want.

Take kanvas out of the app

The app has received some massive iOS 8 photo extension capabilities. If you’re sporting the latest operating system version, you’ll be able to use all your favorite Kanvas editing tools for fixing things in your photos app, including more than 100 overlays and mantras, the 100 font types supported, 300 custom and branded sticker pads and so on. Changing opacity, kerning, color rotation and so on are also available.

There’s also a new discover feature to help users find kanvases they love by searching for various topics, including humor, nature, fashion and art. There are some new sticker packs too, and it feels like new ones are always added to the mix.