Swipewipe, a US photo management app that has gone viral among Gen Z thanks in part to TikTok, is being acquired. French mobile app publisher and developer MWM is developing the app in-house after working with Swipewipe's indie developer Adam O'Kane to expand the app's usage. The acquisition allows Swipewipe's founders to part with some funds while still financially benefiting from their work through an ongoing revenue-sharing agreement with MWM.
The sale price was not disclosed, but O'Kane praised MWM for selling the app for a life-changing amount without giving up on his hopes of future success.
“If I were a developer… and I heard about this business… [MWM] “We're helping app developers and entrepreneurs put themselves in a position to do what they want and we'll take care of the rest — that's pretty appealing,” O'Kane said.
But like most overnight successes, Swipewipe was anything but.
Image credit: Swipewipe
O'Kane says he's been tinkering with social apps since he was 17. He's now 34.
After his daughter was born a few years ago, the founder realized that rather than hitting home runs, he might want to aim for more modest wins like singles and doubles, which is what led him to focus on Swipewipe, a photo management app that gamifies the process of deleting unwanted photos from your iPhone's camera roll.
Deleting old photos is a common practice among Gen Z. They grew up with phones with less storage capacity and tend to have a different attitude towards photography than previous generations. Gen Z tends to use photos to introduce themselves to the world and capture moments when posting on social media, but they don't necessarily want to archive photos for long periods of time. They also regularly delete photos from their Instagram accounts.
While O'Kane acknowledged that Swipewipe was far from the first photo cleanup app, he envisioned an experience that would appeal to users by making the process more fun, almost like a game.
“I envisioned big colorful blocks that communicated progress very clearly to the user, because this was a big task,” he said. “One of the pain points I saw in other apps was that [photo cleanup] We got it down to this manageable way.”
In 2021, O'Kane teamed up with contractors to help develop the app, while he was responsible for interface design and product management. The app launched the following year on app discovery site Product Hunt, but it didn't gain much of a following.
Image credit: Swipewipe
That's when MWM, a company O'Kane had never heard of before, reached out. The French company proposed a new publishing platform that would work with third-party studios to provide ad spend and monetization support. After reviewing Swipewipe's metrics and running some qualitative tests, MWM welcomed Swipewipe into their program and began working directly with O'Kane.
Still, as MWM had warned, the app wasn't an instant hit.
But being freed from the business side allowed O'Kane to focus on the product while still owning the app. After an unsuccessful attempt at monetization through interstitial ads last year that was subsequently removed, Swipewipe has found success with a subscription model combined with native ads. The app has now been downloaded more than 5 million times, and MWM expects to generate more than €10 million in revenue from iOS alone this year, mostly from Swipewipe's subscription revenue.
As the app grew, so did the public's attention. Swipewipe was featured on KTLA in Los Angeles. By summer, its numbers had skyrocketed, with the app's monthly active users growing from 15,000 in July to 300,000 just two months later. In December, TechCrunch featured it as a hidden gem in the App Store.
O'Kane remembers waiting in line for an amusement park ride recently and seeing teenagers using his app, which he likens to the feeling a musician has when they hear their song on the radio for the first time.
“It felt really good, and I thought, they're on Instagram and Snap and TikTok and they're in this long, rollercoaster line and they're choosing my little app. It felt really cool,” he says.
The app then became popular on TikTok, after which Swipewipe and MWM launched paid campaigns. Currently, Swipewipe has over 1 million monthly active users.
The deal not only allows O'Kane to sell the app to MWM, but also gives him a cut of the ongoing profits.
“We're very happy with it, we're not tired at all, and there's so many features we want to add to the app because we feel like we've only just scratched the surface,” O'Kane said. “I think photography has been a category that people overlooked so much. For me, it started out as just a utility. But really, photography is our life. Who doesn't have a cluttered camera roll? We have all these great memories and things locked away in our photo grid. I want to not just help people clean up their photos, but to help resurface memories and give them new context.”
Image credit: MWM
For over 10 years, MWM has operated as an app development studio producing around 30 apps in areas such as music, coloring, drawing and video editing, including Edjing Mix, the most downloaded DJ app. Just before the COVID-19 outbreak, MWM raised around €50 million in Series B funding and transformed itself from just an app development studio into an app publisher, leveraging its decade of app development knowledge to help others succeed. As a publisher, MWM currently works with over 350 app development studios. To date, MWM says it has generated $600 million in revenue and grown its own app catalog to 50.
“The idea is very simple: we help developers find the secret key to unlocking the App Store,” said Jean-Baptise Hirondet, CEO of MWM. “It's very simple: we work with them on three main layers: monetization, product and user acquisition. These are the three main pillars that unlock the App Store.”
To find apps, MWM uses its marketing intelligence tools to search for apps with good KPIs, good ratings, and appropriate usage. It then contacts developers with the promise of potentially increasing app revenue by more than three times. To run the tests, developers integrate with MWM's SDK, which allows them to run basic user acquisition tests. Based on the business results, developers may be offered a contract. The company continues to support developers with technology, including AI techniques, to further enhance the app.
While Swipewipe is not MWM's first acquisition (the company has bought other studios before), this is its largest, and MWM hopes it can put its name forward to other developers looking to help in a similar way.
MWM hopes its deal with Swipewipe is a good example of what it can bring to developers at a time when privacy changes and other things from both Apple and Google are making it harder for small teams to succeed.
“It's not the same as it used to be. So we're proposing our skills and our 10-year journey, [developers] “To build something bigger. And we have the same mission: to put the app and great experiences in the hands of millions of people,” Hironde said.