Aviary, Adobe and Empowering the Future of Mobile Creativity

We can barely contain our excitement today as we announce that Aviary has been acquired by Adobe. Together we will build and connect the next generation of creative applications.

While this news undoubtedly points to a fantastic future, it is worthwhile quickly recalling the recent past to help explain why this acquisition is such a tremendous next step for all concerned.

Aviary was founded to bring creative freedom to the world. In everything we’ve ever done, Aviary seeks to inspire people to express themselves freely and creatively. Many people are familiar with our self-titled photo apps — with intuitive editing experiences and an ever-expanding collection of creative content (custom photo filters, frames, stickers and more).  In fact, we’ve had more than 100 million downloads to date! But the platform that's powering these apps behind the scenes has always been the largest part of our efforts. It also forms the backbone of a free SDK that we offer to third-party developers. This allows us to extend our technology and creative tools not only to Aviary app users, but to users of thousands of other creative mobile apps that today are used by millions of people to edit billions of images each month. It also gets at the core of Aviary’s philosophy: that mobile creativity happens best across a diverse ecosystem of apps that users are free to choose, not in silos.

Aviary's HQ in New York City is very close to the offices of Behance, the creative community that joined Adobe 18 months ago – and that is now a cornerstone of Adobe's Creative Cloud offering. Over the last year, we've gotten to know Behance co-founder Scott Belsky, who now serves as Adobe's VP of Products and Community. Scott and Govind Balakrishnan, Adobe's VP of Product Development for the Creative Cloud Ecosystem, have been driving an initiative to extend Adobe technology to third-party creative applications — an effort that manifested itself in June when Adobe launched its Creative SDK in private beta. As we all talked (and talked, and talked…), it became obvious that we shared a strong vision for mobile creativity. It became even more obvious that we should join forces, accelerate combined efforts and better serve even more app developers and even more people wanting to be creative on mobile. Today, we start that journey together.

Already, our teams are brainstorming on things that we can accomplish together. We will continue to support and enhance Aviary's SDK as part of Adobe's broader Creative SDK offering. While ensuring no interruption to Aviary's developer community, or their apps’ users, we plan to add additional components and services for developers to incorporate – such as the ability to save creations to Creative Cloud in Adobe file formats, access Photoshop technology, and connect creativity across devices using the Creative SDK.

On behalf of everyone at Aviary, I’d like to thank our developer partners and the millions of people who use Aviary-powered apps. Your support has gotten us this far. We’re now going to deliver so much more for you – as part of Adobe.

For more information, read the Adobe press release here.

Tobias Peggs, Aviary’s CEO

Remove blemishes on #Selfies with Aviary’s new iOS SDK.

Almost 80 million people used Aviary last month to edit their photos, across 7,000+ partner apps using the Aviary Photo Editing SDK.

Aviary’s SDK enables developers to give their users the best photo editing experience possible, with about 15 minutes integration work. Leading companies like Kakao, Tango, Walgreens, Yahoo! Japan, Photobucket and more have all integrated Aviary into their apps – giving their users incredible photo editing tools alongside a never-ending stream of fabulous photo filters, creative stickers and fantastic frames.

We released a big update to our iOS SDK in April.  Hot on its heels comes a new update that developers can grab right here. 

This new update now includes our #Selfie Suite of tools – including our powerful “Blemish Remover” that the UK’s Daily Mail loved so much when we first pushed this our in our own app a few weeks ago. (Remember: we road test functionality in our own app first, before pushing an iterated and/or bugged-fixed version to the SDK.)

The UK's Daily Mail puts Aviary's Blemish Tool through its paces. 

Some of our partners report that 7-in-10 photos edited in their apps are #selfies. If that sounds like your audience, then grab the new SDK now - and give your users “the secret to the perfect selfie” with Aviary.

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75 million people need their stickers! Aviary delivers them with Node.js and MongoDB.

In April, more than 75 million people edited their photos with Aviary. As a consequence, we serve content to millions of users around the world every day.

This content - which ranges from new photo filters and sticker packs to promotional messages - is served by a powerful back-end infrastructure that we refer to internally as "the CDS" (Content Delivery System). 

The system was built on Node.js and MongoDB to deliver virtually any content to devices of all kinds in a platform-optimized way. This flexibility allows us to regularly expand both the types of content we serve and the types of devices we serve to without any back-end code changes.

In this talk, given at the November 2013 MongoDB Users Group meetup, Aviary engineers Jack Sisson and Nir Zicherman discuss how they architected the CDS to withstand problems of scale and versioning. Enjoy the video! 

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Aviary’s new iOS Photo Editor app. A magical way to create and share beautiful photos.

We’re thrilled to release one of the biggest updates ever to Aviary’s iOS app today. You can get Photo Editor by Aviary - for free - right now, right here.

The app is stuffed-full of new features and technology – not to mention hundreds of photo filters, artsy frames and fabulous stickers. But it all adds up to being a magical way to help you create and share beautiful photos. Here are just of handful of highlights in this new release:

• All-new suite of Selfie tools. We can’t take enough Selfies. But with this new app they’ll look even better than before! With our completely new Blemish tool you can magically remove imperfections from your Selfie with a single tap. Meanwhile, our Blur tool does exactly what it says - giving you the power to blur out lines/wrinkles and subtly soften edges. Our Red Eye Remover has been massively upgraded - and is perfect for post-processing those harshly lit pics. And our classic Teeth Whiten tool can quickly give your pearly whites a pop. Go style that Selfie!

Style your selfies with our all-new blemish tool, teeth whiten tool and blur tool.

• Fabulous Content Packs to get creative. We’ve added a whole new range of fantastic filters, frames and stickers in our Supply Shop. You can add these in combination and take your photos to a whole new level. Pro tip 1: combine the Reportage Filters with the Blossom Stickers to create a high-fashion take on springtime style!​

Get creative with fabulous stickers

• Undo/Redo. The more you get experimental and creative with Aviary’s Content Packs, the more you’ll want the freedom to undo and redo an effect before finalizing your edit. In fact that’s our Number One user request… and it’s finally here! Yep, you can now undo or redo any effect by simply swiping from left or right on your photo. You asked for it, we delivered it.

Apply an effect, then simply swipe to Undo and start again.

• Automatically make your photos look awesome. If you want to simplicity to the extreme, we’ve completely overhauled our Enhance tool to include superfast one-tap photo editing for Food, Nightlife, Nature and Portrait pictures. We’ve also kept our classic Hi-Def option to give your photos an instantaneous boost. One tap and done!  
  

Apply some one-tap magic with our all new Enhance options.

• Share to everywhere. Once you’re done editing a photo, Aviary now makes it dead easy to share to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook (you can even now tag your Facebook friends in a picture). Pro Tip 2: You can also share to WhatsApp, WeHeartIt, Tumblr, Line and more if you’ve already got those apps installed on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Simply tap “More” on the Share Screen - and share photos anywhere you like!

Of course, as with every Aviary release, there are a huge number of additional optimizations, improvements and other goodies tucked away in every corner. Meanwhile, Photo Editor by Aviary is available in 17 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Bahasa Indonesia. So wherever you are in the world, go explore Aviary’s new iOS Photo Editor app – and let us know what think!

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A thousand new apps on Aviary's Photo Editor SDK in a week.

Aviary’s SDKs have been powering photo editing in thousands of apps, and for millions of users, since September 2011. In that time, our developer ecosystem has grown to over 7,000 partners. In March this year almost 80 million unique people edited their photos on Aviary’s platform across that ecosystem.

We talk with developers a lot - and they love the ease of integration, the quality of the technology, and the intuitive photo editing tools that Aviary can provide for their users. We’re proud to work with these developers; and to have become an integral part of their apps and business. But there's always more we can do... and are doing. 

We launched a big upgrade to our SDKs last week.

In just one week, more than one thousand new apps have signed up to join our ecosystem! (1,181 as of 9pm last night, to be exact ;)

That’s super exciting, especially as we’re now also offering developers monetization opportunities - though our IAP and Branded Content / Native Ad models, which get distributed along with the SDK. 

What’s even more exciting is the diversity of apps that are integrating Aviary’s photo editing SDK. From commerce apps, to social apps, to lifestyle apps, to creative apps, to messaging apps… it’s clear that we’re long past the point where photo editing is just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing – especially on mobile – is now about enhancing visual communication across many use cases between billions of people across the planet.

The charts below provide an overview of the 1,000+ new apps that have joined Aviary’s ecosystem in the last 7 days.  

As we’ve seen consistently across the last Quarter, the number of new Android apps being built on Aviary’s SDKs is outpacing the number of new iOS apps by 3 to 2. Although iOS apps dominate the current make up of our overall ecosystem, the rapid growth of Android in that mix is startling.

Meanwhile, while new Android developers are still building a lot of photo editing and creation apps, our new iOS partners are more diverse – with social networking apps that include photo editing now accounting for almost a quarter of new apps built on Aviary’s iOS SDKs.

We'll post an update to this a month from now - and analyze additional trends we're seeing. 

But if you’re a developer who needs kick ass photo editing in your app right now – come and grab our SDK right here.

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Kon'nichiwa from Photo Hack Day Japan!

Kon'nichiwa from Tokyo!

Six of us from Aviary HQ in NYC are happy hacking in Tokyo this weekend - as we host Photo Hack Day Japan.

This is our 5th Photo Hack Day - and our first international event. We’re running the event in partnership with our good friends from Mixi, one of Japan’s largest social networks (and a long-time Aviary SDK partner).

It’s about time we took Photo Hack Day international. Last year 600 Billion photos were taken by people all around the world. And many of those were taken, and edited, and shared thanks to apps and apis and services made by people at his hackathon. Over 100 people are at the event, either hacking on new apps or offering developers help with their APIs – including folks from Shutterstock, Getty, EyeEm, 500px, Amazon, SendGrid, LeapMotion, Pinterest and more.

We are all part of an incredible global community of developers that are all obsessed with photos. Bringing that community together is why Aviary started Photo Hack Day in the first place. Japan is more obsessed with photos than anywhere else on the planet - so Tokyo is the perfect place to host our first international event. 

The idea is simple: to bring like-minded people together - to have fun for a weekend, to experiment, to hack, and to invent new ways to for people to create, edit, share and communicate with photos. As I tap out this blog post, I can see some really cool apps being created in every corner of the room. We’ll post the list of winners once the judging has happened later today.

- Tobias 

Happy New Year from Aviary!

New Year’s – a time when as individuals and companies we pause for a moment to consider why we’re here, what we do, and how we do it.

At Aviary we strive to inspire people to play with their visual world – by giving them the magic to re-imagine, reinvent, reshape, and share what they see.

Aviary believes that if we are more tuned in to the world we see around us – and if we express our individuality, perspective, and sense of humor through the images we create and share – then stronger bonds and connectivity will be built.

Obama building stronger bonds and connectivity.

2013 – the year of the #selfie – was full of good times for Aviary. We helped millions of people across the globe play with their own visual worlds using Aviary’s photo editing technology. Those experiences happened in many places: in one of our own-brand, Top-10, mobile photo apps; or in one of thousands of partner apps utilizing Aviary’s SDKs. But wherever the magic happened, we’re delighted it happened with Aviary and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

We can’t wait to get started on 2014 – to bring to Aviary’s magic to even more people in even more ways. But we thought it would be fun first to reflect on 2013 and share some insights on what is now, undisputedly, a global photo phenomenon that we are all part of (including The President).

Capturing Reality – and Editing Reality – Are Booming:

It's estimated that 500 billion photos were taken in 2013, and this might balloon to some 880 billion in 2014. That’s more than 10 photos for every person on the planet.

More than 1% of this massive number of photos is edited with Aviary. A staggering 6 billion photos were edited in our mobile apps, or in partner apps using Aviary’s SDK, in the last year. In November 2013, 70 million people edited photos with Aviary. That’s up from just 25 million people in November 2012.

Our own-brand app – Photo Editor by Aviary – grew like wildfire this year. On Android alone we jumped from 1.6 million MAUs at the end of 2012 to over 10 million MAUs now. Photo Editor by Aviary was also recognized by both Apple's and Google's "Best of 2013" lists. 

At the same time, our partner network grew to almost 7,000 strong. Many of them – including Tango, Walgreens and Pic Stitch – also made Apple’s Best of 2013 list, which was a real thrill.

But perhaps the most telling trend is the diversity of apps that have joined our partner ecosystem this year. We’ve seen an explosion of interest beyond photo apps – which were the majority of our partners previously. In 2013, we found ourselves (and our SDK magic) happily tucked inside increasing numbers of messaging apps, social apps, commerce apps and many more.

A New Visual Lingua Franca Has Emerged:

Unquestionably, photos have become the communication language of the mobile generation. We are long past the point when photo editing was just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing is now about enhancing visual communication between billions of people across the planet, in a way that embodies the full richness of emotions, feelings and inspiration.

That range of expressive possibilities is driving a huge increase in the volume of photos shared to social networks, as well as the increase in diversity of sharing destinations.

In November 2013, 8% of photos shared from Aviary’s apps were shared to Facebook and 8% to Instagram – reasonably consistent with percentages in 2012, but at massively larger volumes. However, in that same period, 7% of photos were also shared to WhatsApp – which barely registered with us this time last year. A picture is worth a thousand words, and apparently now almost as many messages. Meanwhile, in December, users shared to over 350 different social networks from Aviary's apps. Mobile photography is truly social. 

Search for "#Aviary" on Twitter

In 2014 we expect that Aviary’s magic will continue to attract new, diverse partners to our ecosystem, and that users will continue to share their edited photos, touched with that same Aviary magic, across new platforms that haven’t even been launched yet.

For a great visual of this social sharing activity, search for “#Aviary” on Twitter and enjoy the edited photos flowing right there in the stream. It's a powerful way to see how people all over the world are acting on the same desire to capture and share a moment of their lives, and communicate it just the way they want to.

Photo Editing Trends and Styles – from #Selfies to Stickers: 

At Aviary, we’re constantly driven to find new ways that inspire people to play with their visual world. For example, we put a lot of love this year into developing new creative photo editing functionality – such as Color Splash tools and Tilt Shift. Likewise, we regularly release a flow of new content to help people re-imagine their pictures – such as beautiful filters, frames and fun stickers. Our roadmap is even fuller for 2014. But how are people using these tools and content?

Aviary's Color Splash Tool

Back in 2012, the top three most used Aviary tools were Filters, Auto-Enhance and Stickers. In 2013, Filters and Auto-Enhance were still the top two tools, but now Blemish Removal is number 3. This trends consistently with the explosion in #selfies. (Why have an imperfect #selfie when you can have a perfect one?!)  

“Pop Art” filter pack and “Craftmas” sticker pack, available in Photo Editor by Aviary

Within Filters specifically, we’ve also seen shifting trends. Whereas in 2012 our most popular filters had a retro vibe, 2013 has seen the adoption of more modern, vibrant effects. Bright filter packs like “Wanderlust” and “PopArt” are big hits, but at the same time arty effects like “Shadow Pro” consistently rank highly in our most-used charts.

2013 also saw the rise of photo editing as craftwork. Our “Craftmas” sticker pack – perfect for turning mobile photos into home-made cards and gifts – was one of the biggest hits of this holiday season.

Kelly Clarkson’s “Wrapped” Frames, available in Photo Editor by Aviary 

We were also excited to roll out two new content-related offerings in 2013.

Now, apps in our partner ecosystem – using the Aviary SDK – can sell Filters, Frames and Stickers to their own users. (Partners can even work with Aviary to create their own custom content.)

Additionally, we soft-launched Aviary Branded Content as a way for brands to connect with our massive network audience in highly engaging, photo-centric ways. Brands like Gap, RedBull and Disney jumped onboard this year. RCA records got in on the act too, offering Kelly Clarkson fans a range of holiday-themed filters, stickers and frames to celebrate her platinum album “Wrapped in Red”.

Aviary and the Global Photo Phenomenon:

As the photo phenomenon goes global, so do we. When we redesigned Photo Editor by Aviary for iOS7 in September, it quickly became a Top 10 App in Apple’s “Photo And Video” category in 67 countries. Meanwhile, our SDK was downloaded for integration by app developers in 143 countries this year. While the top five most active countries for SDK downloads were somewhat expected – USA, India, China, Brazil and the UK – by looking deeper into our top 20, you can paint your own picture of a photo-obsessed planet. From Vietnam to Mexico, from Japan to Germany, the diverse number of apps being built around the world with a little bit of Aviary magic is incredible. It's a visual United Nations.

And our internationalization goes far beyond the must-have translations for tools and functionality (we support 23 languages at this point). Just as written and verbal communication is different everywhere, visual communication is equally localized. This means that the Filters, Frames and Stickers we create for people around the planet has to reflect the norms, styles, visual cues and iconography of different cultures. Our Japan launch was the most distinct example of this approach – with our Japanese app now chock-full of Kawaii stickers and Purikura packs. We’re also excited to announce that our next Photo Hack Day will be taking place in Tokyo, co-hosted by our long-term friend and partner Mixi.

Kawaii stickers and Purikura packs, available in Photo Editor by Aviary (in Japan)

New Year, New Office, New Co-Workers (You?):

In conclusion, 2013 has been an incredible year for photography – and for Aviary. We can't wait to get started on 2014. We’ll be moving into a brand new office space in New York’s East Village in February, and we’re hiring like crazy. So if you want to inspire people to play with their visual world – and work with us to give everyone the magic to re-imagine, reinvent, reshape, and share what they see – then check out our jobs page and please apply!

See you next year!

- Team Aviary

Aviary and WP8 SDK development

There have been a couple of stories posted in the last two days about Aviary and the Windows Platform. 

I wanted to clarify things for our developer community. 

Firstly, we are a small team passionate about helping developers add magic photo editing capability to their apps. This year has been very successful for Aviary - we have seen our ecosystem of developer partners quadruple, and have edited over 6 Billion photos on our platform. Meanwhile, through in-app monetization programs (such as selling premium filters, stickers, and frames) developers not only get fantastic technology from us, which can be integrated in minutes, but they can also make money with Aviary. 

So far so good. 

But as anyone connected with start up will tell you, success comes from focusing. The minute you do too much, you actually do nothing very well. 

For that reason, every single Quarter, we sit down as a team and plot a detailed product roadmap - a roadmap that is focused, that will meet and exceed the needs of as many of our developer partners and their users as possible, and that doesn't stretch our own team too thin. We take this exercise very seriously - and that's one of the reasons we've been able to deliver consistently high quality work. 

For this past Quarter (Oct, Nov, Dec), that focused product roadmap saw us release a new iOS SDK optimized for iOS 7; completely upgrade our Android offering to give developers the ability to sell premium filters, stickers and frames to their users; enhance our web-based photo editor to enable partners to upload their own premium content; as well as continue to invest in our core imaging technology. That was quite a lot to chew off! And it's paid off - it's been our biggest Quarter yet in terms of number of partner photo edits, number of new developer parters joining the ecosystem, and revenue we've created for that developer ecosystem.

However, in the name of focus, in this current Quarter, as has been pointed out on WPCentral and Engadget, we did not actively develop our Windows platform. We launched our SDK product for Windows last March and while we saw some initial pick up... the numbers were dwarfed by our 6,500 partners on iOS, Android and Web. Something wasn't working. So what we decided to do with Windows this Quarter was pause for breath, actively listen to feedback from the windows developer community, and rethink our approach for 2014. In retrospect, we could have done a clearer job of communicating to the Windows community what we were doing. (Especially, when we cited "lack of platform traction" in our forums, we were not bashing WP8 but talking about the pick up of our own platform on WP8 relative to its runaway success on iOS and Android). But hopefully now this blog post will clear things up.

There are certainly a lot of vocal Windows developers and fans out there! This is great news. We're looking forward to hearing more from you - please keep the feedback coming. Again, that helps inform how and what we develop in 2014. 

-- Tobias (Aviary's CEO)

This iOS7 Core Principle Was the Secret Behind Our Japan App Launch

We’re delighted to be officially launching our iOS7 app in Japan – today! This means “Photo Editor by Aviary” – our Top Ten US App Store photo editing app – is now available for download in the Japanese App Store.

We care passionately about Japan and the millions of digital trendsetters that reside there, and are constantly looking in their direction to spot glimpses of our own technological future. So we wanted to offer our Japanese users a special – and specific – experience from day one. For that reason, this release is so much more than simply taking an app that works “over here” and blindly giving it to users “over there.” In fact, almost everything inside Aviary has been carefully re-imagined for our users in Japan - from language to content to social sharing.

As anyone who has taken their mobile app international will tell you, re-imagining apps for new audiences can be a lot of work. But our experience was significantly influenced and made easier by one of iOS7’s core principles: Deference to content.

Deference to content is an Apple interface design principle that ensures your  “UI helps users understand and interact with the content, but never interferes with it.” There are many types of mobile content today - tweets, articles, videos, etc - but for Aviary, content is always one of two things: 1) A user’s photo; or 2) Something the user can apply on top of that photo to enhance it - like the gorgeous photo filters, stickers and frames we offer in our in-app Shop. So in Aviary’s photo-dominated world, "deference to content" meant simplifying the UI to its most fluid, functional form and putting content in the leading role - a design approach that we took deeply to heart in our recent iOS7 redesign. Now, as we expand our iOS7 app to new markets, this "content-first" method is exactly what's enabling us to more easily create totally custom experiences for global audiences like Japan.  
      
We understand that the best content Aviary offers delivers an emotional connection with the user (users must want to engage with that content, so the connection is absolutely essential). We also understand that content that connects emotionally with users in the USA might not connect emotionally with users in Japan, which is why the content you can now see in Aviary Japan is completely different than what Aviary's American audiences see. On the technical side, this is supported by Aviary’s new geo- and language-awareness, which defers the app to different content in different locations or in different tongues.

For example, when you open the app in the USA, you might see a new sticker pack celebrating the start of the NFL season, alongside a new pack of photo filters that make Western food pics pop. But when you open the app in Japan you might now see hundreds of new Kawaii stickers or tools to give your photos a perfect Purikura-esque makeover. 

In addition to our in-app Shop playing host to a raft of new exclusive content for Japanese users, we've customized the Aviary experience in the following ways:

• Launched a new Japanese home page at Aviary.jp
• Translated all our app’s tools and functionality into Japanese
• Added social sharing options for the most popular social networks in Japan, including Line
• Localized all our in-app messages and App Store descriptions for Japan

We hope you love it as much as we do - tell us what you think!

Introducing Aviary’s First International Edition: Aviary Japan!

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our first international edition of Aviary, designed specifically for our good friends in Japan. As of this morning, a completely customized version of Photo Editor by Aviary, a Top 10 app in the US, can be found in Apple’s Japan App Store - and it’s full of totally exclusive content that you won’t find anywhere else. Come and get it!

Re-imagining the Aviary experience for a brand new audience has been an adventure and an exciting challenge, and we look forward to iterating further based on feedback from Japan’s digital trendsetters. Take a look at our launch features, or download Aviary for Japan now!

Completely Custom and Exclusive Content
Be on the lookout for stickers, frames and filters that will make editing your pictures more creative and more fun - created exclusively for Aviary Japan!

Social Integration
Share your pictures to your favorite social networks like Line, Twitter and more.

Total Translation
All text within Photo Editor by Aviary is now fully translated into Japanese language.

To all our pals in Japan: We can’t wait to hear what you think of it, and we’re looking forward to making Photo Editor by Aviary an irreplaceable part of your photo editing experience. Download Aviary now!

For more information, be sure to visit our new Japanese home page at www.aviary.jp

Download link → https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/aviarynofotoedita/id527445936