mobile

Every beginning has an end. Those were the words on Pressgram’s website, summing up the end of the line for the IOS photo app. After two years of development , the impressive Pressgram app was taken off the app store and today the service will totally shut down. It’s the end of the journey. In a post entitled Goodbye Pressgram, the app’s developer John Saddington thanked investors, the community and his team, but provides little detail about the reason for the shut-down. Reading elsewhere on the web, it seems that, unsurprisingly, the decision to close was due to the costs of running and maintaining the Pressgram service.

It looked so promising. After a slightly disappointing app in 2013, version 2 of Pressgram really reached its promised potential this year. It was fast, great to use and looked fantastic – it even ran well on my old iPhone 3G. So why did i need another app for posting images to WordPress? Well, the official WordPress app is a great way of adding posts to WordPress but Pressgram simplified the process and added photo filters. It was a blogger’s answer to Instagram. The extra benefits of using the app were also convincing. Why send people to some huge Facebook owned website, when you can send traffic to your own website and keep control your work. Personally i just liked the app for its ability to post to a blog quickly, but like many photographers, the aspects regarding controlling your own work were also appealing.

When the Pressgram concept first came to my attention last year, Instagram had been losing angry users due to a poorly worded update to their terms and conditions, that many took to mean a rights grab on images. Pressgram was an alternative, and i like having more than one option for posting my images. Pressgram appealed to those who wanted more control over their photography. Amazingly things worked in Instagram’s favour and annoyed users quietly returned when the dust settled. Trust may have been eroded but certainly no where near enough to start a haemorrhage of users seek out alternative options.

There were a few problems to start off with the first Pressgram; the inclusion of a social network in version one of the app was a big mistake, however, the project certainly had room to develop and grow. Getting things right first time is never easy, especially with a system as complex as this. Pressgram V2.0 corrected many of the problems and improved reliability. It finally became what it should have been from the start. After all that work, hopefully it can be made open source and given another chance… maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.

Currently there seem to few alternatives to the deceased Pressgram app, though the future does hold some hope with an app called Polarfox in development. The website states :-

‘Polarfox for iPhone and iPod is fast, beautiful, easy to use and lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, WordPress self-hosted, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Facebook Pages, Linkedin, Facebook Groups, App.net and Webhooks.’

It will be interesting to see what that app can do. The IOS 8 share options also provide good alternatives. Will any other apps try to fill the void? Possibly, but it’s tough being an app developer as the Pressgram story shows.

Rest in peace Pressgram. It was great while it lasted.