Yahoo has just quietly announced that they’ve acquired GhostBird Software, the creators of advanced iOS photography apps, KitCam and PhotoForge2.
Though details of the deal are still under wraps, Yahoo is explicitly saying that they acquired GhostBird for the sake of improving Flickr. Could this suggest that a more advanced Flickr app is on the way?
Prior to today’s acquisition, GhostBird had released three iOS photo apps: KitCam, PhotoForge, and PhotoForge 2. KitCam allowed for mobile photographers to shoot with a bunch of different “lenses” and “films” (read: filters), and to manually adjust settings like white balance and exposure. The PhotoForge series, meanwhile, focused on modifying photos after the fact, with image resizing, cropping, metadata editing, and the adjustment of advanced settings like curves and levels.
In an announcement on their website, GhostBird has disclosed that no further development will be done on either app, and they don’t intend to support new versions of iOS. Furthermore, according to GhostBird, once either app is gone from your phone, it’s gone for good:
Users who have previously purchased the app but don’t have them on their devices today will not be able to re-download past purchases. As of today, KitCam and PhotoForge2 are no longer available for download from the App Store.
This is a bit strange, as most apps that have been removed (or even banned) from the App Store can continue to be re-downloaded through iCloud by anyone who purchased it prior to its removal.
Update: Sure enough, GhostBird misspoke; a Yahoo! rep just confirmed to us that while the apps are being removed from the store, those who already purchased GhostBird’s apps will be able to re-download them through iCloud moving forward.
Curiously, the studio had gone a bit quiet in the past few months, going almost totally silent as of mid-March. After tweeting at least a few times a week for months before, the team’s last tweet before today’s announcement was on March 17. Meanwhile, both PhotoForge2 and KitCam stopped seeing updates at the end of March.
(Fun Fact: Before turning their focus to photography apps, GhostBird dabbled in games. Their one published game, a zombie infection simulator called The Raging Dead, became something of a zombie itself when its final update shipped in February 2010.)