Swimplace vs Gonks
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Swimplace
Discover and create real-world communities around places you love. Engage with groups for shared activities, plan events, and connect with friends in organized spaces. Focuses on meaningful interactions without likes.
- Create and join place-based communities (Pools)
- Discover local activities with 'Around Me' mode
- Organize conversations with 'Spaces' (channels)
- Share media and tag comments
- Private, invite-only, and public Pool options
- Friend system based on mutual following
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People open Swim to explore and engage with life around them. Swim is a fun platform where you create and access communities around places. You see what’s going on around you by simply opening the app. You engage with groups (we call them Pools) of people who do fun, interesting things together in the real world. You create your own communities at the places you love and give access to the people you like. Use the Around Me mode to discover what’s going on around you in the real world, and engage with others at your own pace through Public Pools in places as diverse as streets, cafes, clubs, and university campuses. There are also Pools designated as By Invite, which you can see and ask for access. These Pools are usually created by people engaged in neighborhood sports leagues, book clubs, or hiking groups. Create your own Private Pools to hang out with your friends, chat, share media, or plan your weekend with no algorithm deciding what you see and when you see it. You can create a Pool in less than a minute, geo-tag it and designated it as Public (for everybody to see and access), By Invite (visible but accessible only to members) or Private (invisible to all except the people you invite). Designate Spaces in your Pool (like channels) so that you and your friends can have different conversations, neatly organized, rather than one infinite thread where everything is chaotic. You can share media and open conversations around it by tagging comments, so that your chats and your media are easy to follow and find. Use your Pools as the new visual and organized way to chat and stay in touch with people you care about, and the places you love. Swim is designed with no 'likes' to promote more meaningful interactions. People become your 'Friends' in Swim when you follow them and they follow you back, reciprocity just like in real life.
Gonks
Send random Emsha sounds to your friends by 'gonking' them. It's a simple social networking app focused on sending these sounds to keep connections active.
- Send random Emsha sounds
- Gonk friends
- Friend list management
- Simple user interface
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You have a list of your friends, you gonk them to send them a random Emsha sound. Gonk. It’s that simple. Keep gonking your friends until you die!
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Swimplace at weekly against Gonks's every 3 weeks. Swimplace also leads on ratings volume (6 vs 1). Gonks's advantage is iOS requirement (10.0 vs 13.0). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Swimplace against 5.0 for Gonks. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Swimplace has 6 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Swimplace ships an update weekly, Gonks every 3 weeks. Both last shipped on November 3, 2026.
| Parameter | Swimplace | Gonks |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (6 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 6 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Weekly — better | Every 3 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 13.0 | 10.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 89 MB | 11 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | swim Inc. | Devology for Information Technology |
Customer experience
Swimplace
Gonks
In-app purchases
Swimplace
No in-app purchases
Gonks
No in-app purchases









