Three months after taking on a new $2 million round of funding, the Tel Aviv-based startup known for the Flayvr photo album app is undergoing some big changes. Today the company is officially rebranding as MyRoll, and launching updated versions of its apps for Android and iOS that aim to be the go-to replacement for the default smartphone photo gallery.
In an interview in San Francisco this week, MyRoll founder and CEO Ron Levy said that the goal of the company going forward is to be “more than just an app that organizes your photos and videos.” MyRoll is “replacing and reinventing the gallery experience,” he said. Though over the past two years Flayvr had attracted more than 2 million users who processed nearly 1.5 billion photos through the app, Levy says that the new experience is targeted at servicing an even wider audience.
MyRoll incorporates the core functionality of Flayvr, which was known for automatically organizing and grouping your mobile photos into distinct albums, and expands it into an app that’s meant to be the go-to photo viewing experience on your phone. MyRoll’s photo grouping technology is purportedly more personalized than Flayvr’s, learning from each user’s photo-taking and organizing behavior to surface and highlight the most relevant photos. The app has also expanded its sharing options, making it easy to share individual photos or entire albums with others through text, email, and social networks such as WhatsApp and Facebook.
The experience is intuitive and well-designed, and is perhaps best understood by seeing it. You can check it out in the promotional video produced by MyRoll that’s embedded below:
Right now the app is completely free, and MyRoll, which has 10 full-time staff, does not generate revenue. In the future, Levy says that MyRoll could monetize by offering premium photo storage and sharing options in the cloud. Of course, cloud-oriented photo organizing and sharing is an incredibly crowded space, with tech giants such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Dropbox all angling for the top spot on users’ home screens.
In all, MyRoll is a smart and well-designed replacement for the built-in phone gallery experience that comes with every smartphone. But as it works to grow into a sustainable money-making company in the months ahead, it will come up against much more formidable competition.