Bump

» see bu.mp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the pitch was straight out of a smartphone demo reel. open the app on two phones and bump them against each other gently. the app on both sides would feel the matching accelerometer spike and ping a server with location plus timestamps. the server would then pair the two phones together. contact cards or photos would then move across as if by magic.

the magic part was clever. the matching ip address and rough gps location did the heavy lifting. the accelerometer reading was the unique identifier that distinguished your bump from every other bump happening within wifi range at the same second. david lieb built it with andy huibers and jake mintz at y combinator in 2008 and launched it in the iphone app store in march 2009. by 2011 it was the eighth most-downloaded free iphone app ever. by february 2013 it had passed 125 million installs.

i was on a nokia in 2009 and on android by 2011, so bump was something i mostly saw working on other people's phones. it was an ios-first product in a year when ios meant "the iphone people who had imported it through the gray market and paid extra to a turkish vendor." the user base i would have shared a bump with did not exist in my circles. you could feel the demo was good. you also knew it was not going to fix anything in the actual contact-exchange problem in turkey, which was msn handles, not phone numbers.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the technical story is more interesting than the product. bump's server saw thousands of bumps per minute at peak. for each bump it had to figure out which two phones in the world had just been bumped against each other. the algorithm used a fast first-pass filter on location and time, then a tight match on the accelerometer signature. it was the kind of backend problem you could write a paper on. the team did, sort of, in blog posts and conference talks.

~ what it became ~

google bought bump in september 2013, reportedly for somewhere in the $30 to $60 million range. the founders were rolled into google's photos team. four months later on january 31 2014, google announced bump would shut down, along with a sister app called flock. servers were taken offline. user data was deleted. every existing install on every phone in every pocket became a non-functional icon.

david lieb stayed at google and became one of the people who built google photos, the product that arguably swallowed the entire problem bump had been trying to solve. tap-to-share never went away. it just stopped being its own app. nfc handled some of it, then airdrop, then the share sheet, then sending a link in whatsapp. the gesture bump introduced lived on. the company that introduced it did not.

~ the funny part ~

bump's actual best year was 2010-2011, when the iphone 4 was the most-aspirational phone in the world and an app that let two of them physically connect was a perfect demo for a tv ad. iphone tv commercials from that era used bump as one of the showcases for what an app could do. by 2014 the demo had served its purpose for apple's marketing, and google was free to absorb the team that built it. the app was a kind of cultural product apple needed and google bought, and the actual users never really got asked.

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