EverythingMe

» see everything.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

EverythingMe replaced the Android home screen with one that moved on its own. Install it and your icons regrouped themselves into folders nobody had asked you to make, and the top of the screen filled with whatever the software believed you were about to open, working from the hour and from where you were standing when you last did it. Type a word into it and you got installed apps and web pages back in one list, with sites you used often turned into icons that behaved like applications.

It came out of Tel Aviv. The company was founded in 2010 under the name DoAT Media by Rami Kasterstein, Joey Simhon and Ami Ben David, and its first swing was a mobile search engine rather than a launcher. The launcher came later and was the thing that worked, in the sense that people installed it: fifteen million times, by the company's own count near the end.

The backers were serious. Telefónica put money in, and so did Mozilla, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Horizons Ventures and SingTel Innov8, for a total that Tech.eu reported as more than $35 million and Globes put at $37.5 million. Thirty-six people worked there. On 25 October 2015 the company said it was shutting down, and the reason given was the plainest one available, which was that nobody had ever worked out how a free home screen makes money.

~ the dossier ~

~ the phone that guessed ~

Around 2013 and 2014 a lot of money went into the theory that the phone should predict you. Yahoo bought Aviate in January 2014 for roughly $80 million on exactly this premise and killed it four years later. Nokia shipped Z Launcher on the same idea. Google eventually folded the prediction into the operating system, where it sits today as suggested apps and a feed you swipe to, having reached the conclusion that this is a feature of a phone and not a product you can sell.

Swapping the launcher was a normal Android habit in those years, more so for anyone who worked with computers for a living, because the stock home screen was the one part of the phone you could replace without rooting it. That is the market EverythingMe was fishing in, and the problem with that market is that its people are few and are used to paying nothing.

~ thirty-five million dollars ~

Telefónica and Mozilla were in it for a reason that had nothing to do with a launcher on its own merits. A carrier wants a home screen it controls, because the home screen is where an operator gets to be something other than a bill. Mozilla was building Firefox OS at the time and needed exactly this: web pages that could act like apps, on a phone, for people who would never visit an app store. When Firefox OS was wound down and Telefónica lost interest in owning the first screen, the strategic case went with them and what was left was fifteen million people using a free thing.

~ where the idea went ~

The launcher's own goodbye went up on 22 November 2015 and said it was leaving the Play Store. Anyone who had it installed kept it working for a while longer on a server that was no longer being paid for, which is the usual arrangement. In 2026 everything.me does not resolve.

The prediction shipped anyway, on hundreds of millions of phones, for free, as a row of icons at the top of the Android app drawer that nobody thinks about. That is what happened to the whole 2014 cohort of contextual startups: the guess was right, and being right about a feature turned out to be worth nothing to the company that had it first.

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