A daily affirmations app managed to generate 22M views with an incredibly minimal format.

Shimmer describes itself as an app for daily affirmations that feel personal to the user’s life.

Between November 2025 and January 2026, they gained serious traction across both TikTok and Instagram through fully faceless videos.

The two platforms contributed almost equally, with around 11M views each.

What made the approach effective was the feeling that the app had somehow predicted what was about to happen.

Most of the videos showed nothing more than a phone screen.

A text would arrive from an ex or a crush, usually with something emotionally charged, saying they missed the viewer, wanted to get back together, or were still thinking about them.

At the same time, the screen displayed a large Shimmer home screen affirmation that seemed to manifest that exact message.

One of the strongest TikTok examples reached 2.7M views and 40K bookmarks.

The top Instagram version followed the same logic and reached 3.2M views with 23.5K bookmarks. This time the message came from a crush rather than an ex, but the structure remained intact. A desire was stated first through the affirmation, and the incoming text arrived as if to confirm it.

Even the way the sender was presented seemed carefully controlled.

The videos almost never used a full name.

Usually it was just an initial, like ‘A’ or ‘J’, enough to feel personal but short enough to keep the screen clean and legible.

That small decision likely helped the format travel, because everything on the screen could be understood at a glance.

Shimmer found a format that plays directly into one of the strongest emotional desires on the internet: hearing from the person you still want.

That is what gave the videos their force. The app sat inside a fantasy that already lives close to the heart, reconciliation, confession, a message finally arriving, and made it feel momentarily real.