Appics looks good on first look. With funding they can reach many users and if they can develop a comparable Instagram alternative with balanced reward system they should succeed.
I also believe their success or failure will encourage or discourage respectively many other developers to use SMT in their platforms.
Yes, that is true. All eyes are on them now as MANY other projects will try to learn from their success or failure.
We'll have to wait for them to integrate their 'Appics' on steem's smt. No one will get discourage if at the first place there's no intervention of smt on these so called steem based apps.