Frontback

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

~ the obituary ~

frontback shut down on 15 august 2015. the announcement came in a blog post on 23 july. the app had launched almost exactly two years earlier, out of the same brussels team that had built a linkable-annotations tool called checkthis and had pivoted to try mobile photo. its whole idea was one screen: take a photo with the back camera and the front camera at the same time and stack them one on top of the other. one image of what you were looking at, one image of your face looking at it.

ceo frédéric della faille wrote the shutdown post himself. he said the team had spent the year trying every variation of onboarding and daily-return notification, and none of them had moved the retention curve enough. "for most of the new members it takes too much time and effort to understand why frontback is different, resulting in an infrequent use of our product." vice's shutdown piece put it more directly: frontback was not the winner.

i was thirty-one when frontback launched and living in ankara. dual-camera photo apps were the kind of thing that got covered in the middle-of-the-app-store-launch cycle by techcrunch, then made their way to turkey six months late through a friend showing you the app on their new iphone. i did not download it. by 2013 my photo habit was already google photos on android with unlimited free backup. one more social feed with no local friends on it was not a hook.

~ the case file ~

~ the gimmick ~

the split-screen dual-camera shot was a real ux insight. before frontback, you could not take a photo with both cameras simultaneously on ios. the phone hardware supported only one active camera stream at a time, and frontback had to shoot them in fast sequence and stitch them together. the result looked spontaneous even though it was engineered. the appeal was obvious for a two-second window: your face reacting to the thing you were photographing, in one frame.

the app raised $3.5 million in seed funding on that concept alone. alexis ohanian led, charlie cheever from quora joined, ashton kutcher's a-grade fund put in, jack dorsey put in personally. the celebrity install list was the shortest path to app-store rankings anyone had that year. frontback hit the top 100 photo apps in the us in late 2013 and stayed there through most of 2014.

~ what killed it ~

ios 9 arrived in september 2015 with better camera apis. by then the dual-camera photo was something snapchat had a version of and every android maker was showing off in their stock camera app. the frontback gimmick had become a checkbox on a feature comparison chart. more painfully for a social network, the daily active user count needed to make a photo feed feel alive was somewhere around ten times what frontback ever hit outside its opening month.

the app also never solved the monetization question. there were no ads and no in-app purchases. the seed money paid for the runway to grow the feed, and when the feed did not grow, there was no plan b. by mid-2015 the team had been shopping the company for months. no acquirer offered enough.

~ the second life ~

a week after the shutdown post, della faille posted a follow-up: an unnamed partner had bought the app and it would continue as an ios photo tool without a social feed. the mystery partner never went public. the ios app stayed in the app store as a stripped-down two-camera capture utility for several months, then quietly went dormant. the android version was pulled from google play at the original shutdown date and never restored. the frontback social network was dead on the announced day; the app icon just took longer to disappear.

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