Throwback, The App That Sends Memories To Future You, Launches On Android

Last year, a new type of photo-sharing popped up in the world. The app was called ThrowBack, and the idea was to take photos that would be sent to you and your friends sometime in the future, as a way to remember good times past. Today, that app makes its way to the Android platform.

ThrowBack launched a year ago after founder Calli Higgins used the idea for her master thesis.

“After researching why certain images pang us while others don’t, I realized nostalgia is conjured by revisiting something you haven’t seen in a while,” she told TechCrunch. “ThrowBack is an alternative to the current overexposure of our images and the numbness this can create.”

Users sign up with their email and are given the option to take a new photo or choose one from their photo album. From there, users can choose to send those photos into the future, a time that ranges from a month from now or five years from now. Users can also choose the “Surprise me” function, letting the app choose when a photo will be received.

If the user takes the photo within the app (as opposed to pulling from the camera app), the photo will not be saved anywhere on the phone.

After that, the user can designate who the photo should be sent to based on email addresses, and then it’s just a waiting game.

In my experience, it’s somewhat difficult to use the app obsessively since it offers no instant gratification. New users are forced to wait at least a month before their Throwbacks are received, so engagement may be a challenge.

On the other hand, the app is still alive and well and expanding to Android, so maybe nostalgia is just the trick in a world full of over-sharing.