Matt MacQueen

TechCrunch – Flickr Finally Goes Native With An iPhone App.

Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as seamless as a native iPhone application. Now they have that as well.

Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.

There has been no shortage of third-party applications that used Flickr’s pictures, but this app matches the look and feel of Flickr proper much more closely than any of them. Individual photo pages look great and commenting is easy. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easy way to send pictures to Twitter, except through the emailing method.

Why this matters: Sometimes designing the best smartphone user experiences requires better, deeper access to the device, or moving “down the stack” as we say.  The iPhone web apps for Flickr were slow and at times clumsy.  Still us Flickr addicts used them until there was something better, and now there is.  To get speed and a better fit-to-UI-paradigm, nothing beats “going native” on a device.  Nice work, Flickr, you truly understand social media and the user motivations of your core user base.  Check out the eye-opening graph of iPhone camera growth.  That’s a lot of users for 2-megapixels, but doesn’t convenience often trump “quality”? (See also: MySpace. Ahem.)