You know you've got a successful startup when you start getting ripped off by big tech companies. Retro is a perfect example of this. Retro is a popular photo-sharing app that has garnered a following among users who prefer to be able to privately share photos and videos with friends and family. The company was recently caught off guard by a post from X (formerly Twitter), which debuted a new feature in Google Photos called “My Week.” Unfortunately for Retro, the feature is very similar to their own photo-sharing app, encouraging users to take photos as a daily record and displaying them by week.
Retro co-founder and CTO Ryan Olson re-shared the post circulating on X with the comment, “I feel like I've seen this somewhere before…” along with an emoji of a curious face wearing a monocle.
X's post detailing the new Google Photos features links to an APK teardown from Android Authority, which takes a closer look at the Android app to spot upcoming changes. The site also lets you turn on the My Week feature, suggesting a general rollout could be coming soon.
According to the findings, Google Photos will add a new “Featured This Week” tile to its existing memories carousel and will also include a setup wizard to help users select which photos of the week they'd like to share. Users will also be able to invite others to view their weekly memories, similar to how Retro lets users invite friends to the app for a similar purpose.
According to the blog, once set up, photos selected by Google Photos users will appear in dedicated cards in the Memories Carousel. Users can tap on a card to add more photos, view photos shared from the previous week, or even send a message to a contact.
In other words, Google has turned much of the Retro app experience into an add-on to the larger Google Photos product.
When reached for comment, Google would not discuss the similarities between the My Week feature and Retro, but did acknowledge that My Week is something the company is experimenting with in invite-only mode. “We're always trying new ways to help people relive and share memories with the people who matter most,” said Google spokesman Michael Marconi. “We welcome your feedback on My Week, but don't have anything else to share about future offerings.”
Retro CEO Nathan Sharp isn't worried about Google's plans to copy his app's experience, despite the many similarities. But he noted that Google Photos' design is also very similar to Retro's, in addition to making a user's week the main unit of the photo journal. Like his app, Google Photos Journal is displayed in a landscape “filmstrip” style format with rounded outer corners.
But Sharp said Google's product has not yet been released and is subject to change.
Image credit: Retro
“We've both worked for large companies, so we know that there's a lot of testing that happens in-house, and that it's often crude and that things change dramatically before they ship,” Sharp said. Prior to building Retro, he and Olson (a co-founder of Lone Palm Labs, Retro's parent company) worked together at Instagram, so they understand what it's like to be on the other side of things.
“At first, when I look at this, it makes me a little angry because it seems like some things are being lifted from one to one, but this is not something they're shipping,” he explained. “They don't want to be judged by what's going on on Twitter today. So I have to pause for a second and say this is probably a work in progress.”
If the feature does launch, Sharp says he wouldn't underestimate the possibility of Google competing with its own space division, and potentially “with the exact same design.” But he thinks Retro users will appreciate that the app serves a specific purpose: connecting with friends and family.
He said this is very different from an app you might use to store “every photo or screenshot you've ever taken,” edit them, or free up storage space on your phone, which are the primary use cases for Google Photos.
“One of the things that's unique about Retro is that we take a unique approach, not just to our product, but to our ethos,” Sharp says. “At Retro, photo privacy is kept extremely strict. We don't sell or rent user data to anyone. We're not an ad-driven model. We don't have public feeds of people trying to grow their audience, so you're not intruding on anyone other than your family and friends. We don't use user photos to train our AI models. We think that simplicity and focus differentiates us from any large multi-use case app.”
Image credit: Retro
Retro continues to release new features to cater to the needs of this demographic. It also launched collaborative journals and the ability to send photo postcards directly within the app, even if you don't know your friends' addresses. Instead, the app simply prompts your friends to enter their address to receive the postcard, and the address itself remains private. Plus, on Android, users can now send postcards directly from their camera roll. (This feature is free to use, as Retro hasn't built a payment flow yet.)
The startup is also working on bringing widgets to iOS that would let users customize their iPhone home screens, and is developing a feature that allows direct sharing with “keychains” that will have access to a user's entire photo archive, not just photos from the past month.
Eventually, Retro hopes to monetize by offering premium subscriptions, but nothing has been rolled out on that front as of now.