Timehop Brings Its Mobile Time Machine To Android

Timehop, the mobile app offering a way to recall your past one day at a time by displaying your old photos and posts from Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter, is now launching its service on Android.

The app, for those unfamiliar, is a simple service that lets you look back on what happened on this day last year, and the year prior, and so on. It’s a “this day in history” kind of thing, but only for your own content.

The company last summer raised another $3 million in funding led by existing investor Spark Capital, to help it build the new Android version.

To date, the iOS app has topped over a million downloads, and sees a highly engaged user base, 40% of whom open the app every day, says Timehop founder Jonathan Wegener. He declined to share growth numbers, but notes also that the app is in the Top 200 in the U.S. App Store.

screen-only_framedAmid a sea of social photo-sharing applications, Timehop has stood out by offering a unique and clever way of revisiting your past. Thanks to the rise of smartphone cameras, photography became less about photo prints that were collected in physical albums you’d sit down and flip through over and over again with family and friends, and rather became about sharing these “in the moment” missives that are captured, posted, then forgotten.

We simply take too many photos today to ever really remember them or revisit them all. This is also why apps like Instagram have been so compelling – it forced us to slow down and focus on one particular moment, taking the time to make it a memory through the use of nostalgia-inducing photo filters that gave the photo a sense of history.

Timehop takes a different approach to dealing with our digital debris. It lets you time travel every day to remind you of where you were and what you were doing last year. It lets you re-examine your old relationships, return to your vacations, relive your parties and events, and watch your children grow.

“We believe content actually gains value with time, that photographs become more meaningful the older they get,” explains Wegener. “The average person now has digital photos and a social media history going back many years and Timehop’s goal is to become the place the world connects around the past.”

Today, Timehop’s user base tends to be younger high school and college females, but a launch on Android – the mobile operating system with the largest worldwide market share – could soon change those demographics.

The new app, which goes live this afternoon, will be a free download on Google Play. (Update: the link is not yet live on Google Play, stay tuned or refresh this. The app is here.)