Storehouse

» see storehouse.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Storehouse was an iPad app first, and in early 2014 i did not own an iPad. That alone put it on the far side of a wall for me. It was made in San Francisco by Mark Kawano, a designer who had worked on iPhoto and Aperture at Apple before leaving to build the thing he could not find: a way to lay photos and words into one clean scrolling story and publish it in a few taps.

The iPad version landed in January 2014 and the reviews agreed on one thing: it was beautiful. Apple handed it a Design Award that summer and it took a Crunchie for best mobile app. National Geographic ran story experiments on it. The iPhone version followed in September, and Android arrived at the end of 2015.

None of it converted into the kind of growth that keeps a venture-backed app alive. In June 2016 Kawano wrote the note every founder dreads and said the service would close on July 15. The four people who built it went to Square in one piece. From Ankara i only ever saw Storehouse the way you see a well-reviewed film that never opens in your country: i knew it was good and i never once used it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was up against ~

The problem was not Storehouse. The problem was that in 2014 the phone in everyone's pocket already had a camera roll, and the apps people actually opened were the ones that asked for nothing more than a photo and a caption. Storehouse asked you to sit down and compose. It wanted you to be a small magazine editor for an evening. Most people, most nights, did not want that job.

~ what carried over ~

The Storehouse name was later reused by other products, so the grave is easy to lose. What the original left behind is smaller and sadder than a shutdown headline: proof that you can do everything right on craft and still lose to the simpler thing. Kawano had spent years at Apple teaching people that craft wins. Storehouse was the counterexample he had to live through himself.

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