Facebook Camera

» see itunes.apple.com/app/facebook-camera as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2012 i was on android in ankara doing university-tail engineering work. facebook camera was iphone-only at launch, sold through the us app store. it did not get an android port. it did not get a turkish app-store landing page. for the two years it existed it lived inside the small slice of the facebook product surface that was iphone-only.

the launch was a strange piece of corporate theatre, anyway. facebook announced its 1 billion dollar acquisition of instagram on april 9 of 2012. the deal closed in september. somewhere in the middle of those two dates, on may 24 of 2012, the same company shipped its own standalone iphone camera app with batch upload and filters. in those days. the public reading at the time was that facebook had been building the app for months before the instagram offer and was unwilling to throw the work away once the acquisition was inked.

the feature list was real. you opened the app, you got a feed of friend photos pulled straight from your facebook graph. you could select up to a few dozen images from your camera roll, batch upload them with one caption, and pass them through a small crop and rotate and filter pipeline. compared to the main facebook ios app at the time, which forced one-photo-at-a-time uploads, the camera app was a genuine quality-of-life win for anyone who shared lots of photos.

the problem was that the audience for that workflow already had instagram, and the company had just bought instagram. really though.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

for the first weeks after launch the app had a small but real bump in the us app store. press coverage was friendly. techcrunch and the verge ran walkthrough posts that treated the app as a serious instagram alternative for facebook-first users.

the use case it actually served was the batch-upload one. parents with twenty vacation photos. people coming back from a wedding with a full roll. for that user the standalone camera app was faster than fighting the main app. for the average user posting one photo a week, there was no reason to switch off the main facebook icon to use a second app. installs climbed for a month and then flattened.

~ the day it died ~

the last update to facebook camera shipped in august 2013. after that the app sat in the store unchanged for nine months. on may 9 of 2014 facebook pulled the app from the store with no press release, no in-app warning, no migration message. the same week, the company also pulled facebook poke, the snapchat-clone from december 2012.

the official statement, given only when a verge reporter asked, was that facebook had been folding the camera app's features into the main app and the standalone product no longer made sense. in those days. that line was accurate. the main facebook ios app had shipped batch photo upload, captions and tagging, and a filter pipeline across late 2013 and early 2014. by the may 2014 pull date the standalone camera was redundant.

~ what remains ~

facebook camera sits at the start of the standalone-companion-app cycle that the company ran for the next four years. messenger had already been split out as a separate app in 2011. paper would launch in early 2014. poke, home, slingshot, rooms, riff, lifestage, moments, lasso, all of these followed in some form. by 2018 the company had killed almost all of them.

the lesson facebook took from the camera app is the one it kept applying through the decade. you can ship a separate app to test a feature, you can pull the app the moment the main product catches up. the camera app is the cleanest example of the pattern in the catalog. shipped fast, killed fast, no migration. about 24 months from launch to pull.

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