IT was arranged for a Wednesday night in Greenwich Village, and there wasn’t a lot of press about it. But on that particular August evening, a group of people drifted down to the Grizzly Pear for the first ever “meet-up” for players of mobile photo app Appysnap.

This was unusual for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which being that Appysnap wasn’t a New York-creation, drowned in buzz by the local and national tech scene. It was actually a modest project built by a team in Newcastle.

A few people in Manhattan had merely spotted it, played it, and liked it enough to pop down and share a drink with Paul Smith, one of the men who created it.

“We just announced the meet-up to the community while I was over there, and over the course of the night a number of people turned up”, he said. “We hadn’t even done any real press for the app in New York. People just started playing it and joined in.”

Around four months after Appysnap launched on the iPhone, the free mission-based app has arrived on the Android platform.

The app was designed by Newcastle app developers Never Odd or Even, and worked by nudging users to take part in photo-based challenges within a certain time period.

Since it launched, it has seen users delve into their imaginations for photos depicting people casting spells, cats with breakfast produce balanced on them and folk dressed as pirates.

A leaderboard was released in July, which is calculated on points scored from challenges in the last 30 days to allow new users to break in.

Smith said: “We’re up to our seventh update on the iPhone. It’s become much more social now. People are coming out of curiosity.

“There are some people who play 10 times a day, and some who play five times a week, and we can let you choose how much you engage with it.

"It’s shown there’s a market for people who don’t necessarily want to have to think of everything, and just sometimes would like someone to tap them on the shoulder and ask them if they want to play a game.“

Prizes on offer from the site have included Kindles and gift cards. Appysnap is currently running a prize draw through October to win a Macbook Air, and is gearing up to link up with companies who may want to sponsor missions.

The first company to do this is Boldon-based Spotify playlist sharing site ShareMyPlaylists.com, who will be offering music-related prizes through missions next month.

While fans of the app have popped up in a variety of locations in the UK, Europe and elsewhere, the team is also keen to build in more location-based missions for a given town or city.

“The location-based features will go global at the same time. We’ll test them with local missions”, Smith said.