MSQRD

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

~ the last words ~

msqrd's face-swap videos landed on my facebook feed in early 2016 and ran hot for maybe six weeks. i was in ankara on an android phone that could just barely handle the filter without cooking the battery. the trump-face videos and the "swap with the person across the table" clips were the thing everyone posted for a stretch of that spring, then facebook bought the company and the standalone app stopped mattering pretty quickly.

the origin is the small piece i did not know at the time. msqrd got built in 48 hours at the garage48 minsk hackathon at the end of november 2015 by eugene nevgen and sergei gonchar out of belarus with eugene zatepyakin from moscow on the ml side. the ios app went live at the end of december. zatepyakin had a computer-vision face-tracking library from an earlier research project, that library was the thing the whole app rested on. really though, the pitch was simple: run the tracker at 30 fps on a phone gpu, overlay a mask, save the video.

the app hit 50 million downloads inside a few months without buying any traffic. viral distribution through facebook and instagram sharing did all of it. by march 2016 facebook bought the entire team through a shell entity called masquerade technologies. the acquisition amount was never disclosed. the co-founders moved to the facebook london office and got folded into the camera team. anyway, that team eventually shipped what became spark ar and the whole instagram face-filter stack.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

this is one of the small handful of eastern european consumer apps that hit a global audience in the mobile era. belarus had a working software industry through the mid-2010s (epam on the outsourcing side, wargaming on the games side), but consumer apps that broke through in the us were rare. msqrd was one of them. for whatever reason it landed the same february snapchat was getting serious about ar lenses, and the buy was clearly defensive rather than opportunistic. facebook was trying to close the gap on snapchat's camera-first product before it became structural.

~ the acquisition ~

this happened outside the parts of the internet i was reading closely, but the shape of the deal became clear within a year. msqrd stayed available as a standalone app for four more years, but every meaningful update after mid-2016 was actually shipping in the facebook and instagram main apps first, with msqrd getting the crumbs. the team was building spark ar. the standalone app was a legacy commitment they kept honoring because facebook had bought a user base along with the tech and did not want to be seen killing it too fast.

by 2019 spark ar was public and any developer could ship a face filter through the facebook or instagram camera. msqrd's original value proposition (a curated set of celebrity masks in a dedicated app) had been decisively replaced by an open platform inside the products people already had open. anyway, facebook announced the shutdown on 13 march 2020, one month before pulling the plug.

~ what came after ~

every instagram story face filter you touched after 2017 was descended from the msqrd tracker. the underlying pipeline that spark ar shipped, the specific approach to lightweight on-device face-landmark tracking that worked on mid-range android phones without shredding the battery, all of it came out of the zatepyakin research and the minsk team's productization. facebook killed the standalone product but kept the engineering.

that is a better outcome than most acqui-hires. compare it against vine-camera or facebook-slingshot where the whole thing just gets thrown out. msqrd disappeared as a name, but the technology it was built on is still running behind every ar effect in the meta family of apps. for some reason the branding never came back. it did not have to.

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