Five app naming case studies: what worked, what it cost

Big companies make the same naming mistakes as side projects, they just pay more for them. These five are well documented and each one teaches something a small team can use.

Instagram: rename early, before anyone knows you

Instagram launched in 2010 as Burbn, a check-in app named after the founders' taste in whiskey. Users ignored most of it and used the photo feature. The team cut everything else and renamed the app before relaunch, combining "instant camera" and "telegram" into a word that was free everywhere and described the product.

Lesson: the cheapest rename is the one that happens before launch. If the product has changed while you were building, the name should change with it. Once there are users, ratings and a store URL, the cost climbs every week.

Slack: an acronym that reads as a word

Slack is short for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge", which nobody remembers because the name works as a plain English word. The domain and handles were taken at launch; the company used slack.com only after buying it. Before that it lived on a longer domain and nobody minded.

Lesson: a real word with a hidden meaning gives you both memorability and a story. And you don't need the .com on day one. Buy it with revenue, which is what Slack did.

Threads: a name that already belonged to someone

When Meta launched Threads in 2023, an app called Threads had existed since 2019 from a company that later shipped a well-regarded Slack alternative under that name. The smaller company kept its trademark and its domain, threads.com, and had to spend its launch year explaining it wasn't the Meta product. Meta got the name it wanted in the store and took the search traffic.

Lesson: two things at once. First, an exact match in the store from a bigger company will bury you in search even if you were there first, which is why the store check comes before the domain. Second, if you're the big one, a name in use by a shipping product will cost you a trademark fight or a reputation for stepping on smaller teams.

X: the handle you can't buy

Twitter's rebrand to X in 2023 came with a problem the company couldn't engineer around: the @x handle belonged to a user who had registered it in 2007. The platform took it, offered merchandise and a visit to headquarters, and the user later said he had wanted to keep it. It was possible only because the company owned the platform.

Lesson: you can't do this. A dormant handle has no seller and no transfer process, which is why the checklist says handles before domains. Pick a name whose handle is free, or pick your suffix now and use it everywhere.

Cash App: the descriptive name that won

Square launched its payments app as Square Cash in 2013. Users called it "Cash App" because that's what it was, and in 2018 the company renamed it to match. The name is generic, hard to trademark on its own, and impossible to rank for as a plain phrase, and none of that mattered because the product had already won the category.

Lesson: descriptive names work when you're big enough to own the category and fail when you're trying to be found. For a new app, "Cash App" would be invisible in store search under a hundred competitors. Ship with a distinctive name and let users nickname it if they want to.

What the five have in common

• The name was settled, or changed, before the product had to carry it.
• Store presence mattered more than the domain in every case.
• Handles were the thing no amount of money could reliably fix.
• The descriptive option only worked for the company that already dominated.

Run your shortlist through the checklist, then check each name across the stores, handles and TLDs in one search.