Cobook

» see cobook.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Cobook solved a problem that only existed if you owned a Mac. Apple's Contacts app had been the same slab of empty fields since the iPhone shipped, and Cobook replaced it with something that merged duplicates by itself and filled in photos and job titles from the social accounts your contacts had already made public.

It came out of Riga in 2011, built by a six-person Latvian company called Cobook SIA under Kaspars Dancis. Within two years it was one of the most-recommended address book replacements on OS X and iOS both, with more than a million users. For a utility app with no network effect of its own, that is a lot of people separately deciding the stock app was not good enough.

FullContact, a Denver company doing roughly the same job as a cloud service, bought it on 15 January 2014 and moved the entire team to Colorado. Dancis became product manager for the FullContact Address Book. The Cobook apps kept shipping under their own name for two more years, and then on 20 June 2016 FullContact announced they would stop working on 15 August.

My contacts have never lived on a Mac, which leaves this a product I can only read through other people's reviews of it. The reason it earns a grave anyway is the pattern, which is the most common way a good small utility dies. It works well enough that a bigger company buys it, and then the bigger company changes direction.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ riga to denver ~

The Baltic startup scene in 2014 did not have many exits, and this one got written up across the region as a win: Riga's Cobook acquired by Denver-based FullContact, terms undisclosed, six people on a plane. FullContact's own announcement framed it as buying the native client it did not have. Its product was a contacts API with a web app on top, and Cobook was a well-made front end for the two Apple platforms that mattered.

That is a clean fit on paper, and it is also a complete description of what happened next. The client FullContact wanted became the FullContact Address Book. The brand that arrived attached to it was surplus.

~ what fullcontact kept ~

Fifty-six days passed between the announcement on 20 June 2016 and the shutdown on 15 August. That sits at the generous end for a free app being retired by its acquirer. It was still a short window for anyone who had let a third-party app become the only place their contact data was properly organized.

Archive Team ran a grab, which is how the shape of the site is known at all. Cobook published a public profile page per user at cobook.co, with a vCard at the same path with .vcf on the end, and the whole set was enumerable through sitemap.xml. A directory of people's contact details stayed crawlable right up to the last day it was switched on.

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