AppleInsider Staff
Google on Friday announced plans to bolster its Google Photos team with the purchase of Fly Labs, developers behind four iOS apps for making quick video edits on the go.
Fly Labs disclosed the purchase on its website, saying current employees will work on the Google Photos team at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., suggesting the Internet giant is looking to bake advanced video editing tools into the cloud-based photo service.
The developer's apps — Clips, Fly, Tempo and Crop on the Fly — were relatively popular by iOS App Store standards at more than 3 million collective downloads over the past 18 months. According to Fly Labs, more than 20 million videos were created using its tools.
As with other freemium app titles, the flagship Fly Video Editor came with premium editing tools unlockable through in-app purchases. As part of the acquisition deal, however, Google is making all in-app purchases free for three months, at which point all four apps will be pulled from the iOS App Store.
Google's purchase hints at future video editing integration in its own Google Photos product, a service that uses machine learning and computer vision to more easily organize and collate photos.
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
9 Comments
With exploit-ware over-running the Android app business, turning smart phones into bricks, Google should be focusing on important things, like security. When every Android phone, from the Samsung high-end phones down to the while-box shit phones all become bricked, the Android buyer may just get smarter and buy an iPhone while they are replacing their phone.
With exploit-ware over-running the Android app business, turning smart phones into bricks, Google should be focusing on important things, like security.
When every Android phone, from the Samsung high-end phones down to the while-box shit phones all become bricked
And when it is supposed to happen this?
Google will keep buying devs from Apple's own "top ten" App Store lists in their flailing and desperate attempts to remain relevant going forward. Android gives them an increasing number of users and a decreasing share of ad revenue. Their biggest customer base are almost completely dead weight since they do not turn clicks into sales.
While, I don't blame the developers for selling, especially when Google throws big piles of money their way, I just hate to see good apps that I have paid for and use regularly become Google properties. I can't think of a single app that has gotten better or benefited from being a part of Google. Nik is a prime example. I bought their plugin suite for good money and enjoyed continual improvements and new features. Even loved the Snapseed app for mobile and desktop. Despite the fact that google dropped the price on the plugins the development has crawled to a near halt. Fly made some good apps that I bought just for some specific and easy to use features missing from almost every other app in their category. While I have not spent more than $20 with them I just know that this is probably close to the end of the line for their development and one day the apps will not be supported or exist in some dumbed down version lacking the features that prompted me to buy them to begin with.
[quote name="SpamSandwich" url="/t/189979/google-buys-ios-video-app-maker-fly-labs-to-boost-google-photos#post_2802809"]Google will keep buying devs from Apple's own "top ten" App Store lists in their flailing and desperate attempts to remain relevant going forward. Android gives them an increasing number of users and a decreasing share of ad revenue. Their biggest customer base are almost completely dead weight since they do not turn clicks into sales.[/quote] Any source for that decreasing share of revenue?