Starmatic

» see starmatic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Kodak sold a plastic camera called the Brownie Starmatic starting in 1959 and moved something like ten million of them in five years. It was a cheap object for people who were not photographers. Fifty-three years later a company in Paris named an iPhone app after it, drew the icon to look like the camera, and named its filter sets Starmacolor and Starmachrome after the film that camera took.

The app arrived on 5 September 2012, in English and French, iPhone only. That timing put it four months after Facebook closed its purchase of Instagram, which is the exact window when a certain kind of user was actively looking for somewhere else to go. Fifty thousand people registered in the first month.

The press treated it seriously in a way that photo apps usually do not get. It took App of the Week from Stuff and from the Guardian, and it landed in Apple's Top 25 New and Noteworthy in twenty countries. Then Stephen Fry told five million Twitter followers to install it, and Apple's own App Store account pushed it as well. That is about as much free distribution as a small French startup ever gets handed.

The twenty countries where it charted included the United States and China alongside Italy and France. Turkey was not on that list, and in 2012 an iPhone-only app selected its audience by hardware price anyway, which in Turkey has always been a customs question before it is a taste question. I read about this one in an archive rather than remembering it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a toy camera from 1959 ~

Building a photo app on the bones of a specific dead camera is a better idea than it sounds. The 127 film format the Starmatic used produced a square-ish frame with particular color behavior, so the filters had something real to imitate rather than a vague sense of vintage. The interface copied the camera body. You were not applying an effect, you were using an object.

The problem is that the object was the whole product. Instagram at that point was no longer a filter app, it was where the photographs and the people already were. A better filter set cannot move a graph, and every alternative launched in that window was competing on the one dimension that had stopped deciding anything.

~ what half a million users is worth ~

Almost five hundred thousand registered users is a real number. It is also nothing at all, if the thing you are compared against counts in the hundreds of millions and has no reason to notice you. Starmatic never found a way to charge, never got acquired for its team, and the Paris company behind it switched the service off in May 2014 without much of a farewell.

The wave of Instagram alternatives from that period is almost entirely gone now. What survived from it was not a competitor but a lesson every camera app learned quietly: ship your best filter into somebody else's network rather than trying to build a network under your filter.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »