I work on a team called “Tinker”. We try to do a lot of small skunkworks projects: things we haven’t done before. As part of a native app development learning process we decided to build a mobile app for Gravatar. The idea was simple: let people take a quick selfie and upload it to their Gravatar account. We quickly realized, however, that taking selfies and reacting to them was much more fun than updating Gravatars. So we built an app just for that.

Selfies? Really?

Over the years I’ve worked on many very different projects, and when I realized where things were going with this project I had the exact same reaction. On the other hand, what we’d built so far was more fun to use than anything I’d worked on in the past. To quote a coworker:

This is more fun than it has any right to be

For years I’d seen myself as the type of person who doesn’t take selfies: only kids do that, right!? Still, this was fun! Then I remembered looking at old pictures of my dad and laughing at his sixties haircut and giant steel-frame glasses. I now have a young daughter myself, and it suddenly dawned on me that it is now my solemn duty to ensure there are plenty of silly photos of me for her to laugh at one day twenty years from now! Since I’m notoriously bad at being in photos myself — I’m usually the dude holding the camera — maybe selfies was the answer? Turns out the stigma I had attached to selfies was just prejudice. People should take whatever photos makes them happy. If that involves the front-facing camera, who am I to judge?

Besides, if it’s fun, it’s fun. And oh man was it fun.

From that point on, developing this app was the most fun I’ve had designing anything. It’s the first time I’ve used the color “salmon” in great swathes, and it’s the first time I’ve added unicorns to a design. It was time to exude all the fun that we had designing the app, right?

The most fun was in the early days when we opened up the public beta, but before we had too many users. Fun caption wars would break out. Little memes would pop up.

It was a fun way to receive bug-reports:

We’d even ask for feedback via selfie:

Requiem

I’ve never taken as many selfies as I did during development of this app. I have quite a library of exceedingly silly selfies now, and I expect my three-year-old to brutally make fun of me maybe 20 or 30 years from now. Just the thought of that makes me happy.

But all good things come to an end. Today we’re removing the Selfies app from the Google Play store. Apps already installed will continue to work for the foreseeable future. Any selfies you’ve taken are already stored in your phone’s photo library.

As part of this project, we insisted on not creating yet-another-social-network to maintain, so “friending” wasn’t surfaced as a feature. As the userbase kept growing, we realized that a global stream of users wouldn’t scale to accommodate the influx. After a couple of months, it became clear that for the app to continue to stay as fun as it was in the beginning, we’d have to do some major re-architecting. Considering the app started as a learning experience, we’ve decided to sunset it instead, take the lessons we’ve learned and build something new and different.

We’d like to thank you all for making this so much fun, so we collected some of our favorite moments here. We can’t wait to share the next exciting project we’re working on!