Darkroom 3 - The fastest and most powerful photo editor for iPhone

@matthewmagellan Hi Matthew! Thank you for being a loyal fan of Darkroom. An iPad version of the app is one of the most requested features for us, and it's definitely something we want to do moving forward. However, we want to do it right, and we want to make the Darkroom experience good for photographers who use _both_ an iPhone and an iPad, which we think will be a majority of our users. Before we are able to deliver on that promise, we have to establish a common foundation for a multiple-platform world, and we have to refactor a bunch of internals to make them compatible with said world. The good news is that we've done most of that work with this release, so we're much closer to that world today than we were yesterday. Keep an eye out! The pace of work will pick up dramatically with this update.

@loickm Thank you so much Loïck! Appreciate the kind words :)

@lukesbeard Don't tell anyone, but you're the best photographer on the app!

@areskub Out of curiosity, what's been your main motivator to switch?

@jasperhauser Several things. I still love the aesthetic of VSCO but I spend way too much time tweaking my photos in there compared to Darkroom3 and for the same results. DR3's UX is just ten times better. If I had to pick my 3 favourite things in DR3 off the top of my head: - The curve ❤️❤️❤️ - Every tool displayed directly (on VSCO you have to tap one of them to enter its settings, which drains time and motivation) ❤️❤️ - The All-in-one resize tool ( shout out for the white borders) ❤️ The only thing that is not my favourite right now is the fact that the app crashes when I Export -> Modify Original. It still commits the changes so it's not breaking, but still. The only thing that I'm missing is the possibility to "Add Grain". Because I'm old. I still prefer the Analog photos look. Grain is beautiful. All Hail Grain. All in all a solid update to an already good app. Making it gold. GG

@areskub Thanks Steph for you in depth answer. So glad you called out one of the big drivers behind the UI strategy of Darkroom: "Every tool displayed directly (on VSCO you have to tap one of them to enter its settings, which drains time and motivation)". We spend a lot of time making sure that navigation is out of the way as much as possible, in the tap/time sense, not always in the visual sense. Many other apps rightfully make the photo the hero, but forget editing is the primary function and thus a more true balance between viewing and editing is really what is needed. We are prepping an update that should come out soon that will take care of most of the issues people have been reporting. I'm personally also a quiet fan of grain :) So it is likely to pop up at some point.

@jasperhauser I get that tools try to make the photo the focal point, I really do get that. But there are 2 ways to see it: 1. Your photo is perfect to your liking and you shouldn't even be in the app in the first place. 2. You need to tweak at least one element in the photo to make it perfect and in that case, why would you make me tap 3 times to display the right cursor. I'm on my phone, It's supposed to go fast, otherwise I'd use Lightroom on my computer and lose my mind for the infinite time it takes me to at least pop the photo inside the damn app. I'm sorry, designing products is my job so I tend to ramble on forever when I start. 🙇 "I'm personally also a quiet fan of grain :) So it is likely to pop up at some point." 👀

@iamjmw Ah that's a great idea for a post. I'll write about this process in more detail on our Medium publication https://medium.com/the-bergen-co...

@westinlohne Hi Westin, thanks a lot for the kind words. We definitely talked about it, but ultimately decided against going the paid route. Going paid-upfront definitely has its benefits. For one, advertising becomes more feasible since it eliminate the 94+% drop-off of the freemium model. I reckon it would also help us rank higher. However, it also has its downsides, namely that the size of our user-base will vastly diminish. We have spent the past 7 months identifying our monetization funnel, and iteratively improving each step in it. I'm happy to share that in that time, our App Store Impression > Download conversion has more than doubled from 20% to 45%. Our Free > Paid conversion rate has also doubled to the top end of the standard range, all while holding the average sale price steady. Today, millions of people have downloaded darkroom, and hundreds of thousands of users use it monthly, many of them daily. We want to expand that base as much as possible. On a more tactical level, this update, though huge in scope, is a course-correction for us. 60% of the app has been rewritten because 60% of the app _needed_ to be rewritten to pay off a lot of technical debt. There's a technical post I need to write to discuss this in more detail, but the 18 new features we announced are fruit born of that labor. They were either free, or cheap to implement (time-wise). This investment will allow us to move forward much faster, and farther, than we could have before, and you'll see us invest more heavily in monetization in the future. Finally, We have a long term roadmap we are executing on, and that roadmap is best served by a large and thriving mobile community. That's too long term to get into here, now. :)

@farhan_rizvi We worked really to not stop at just creating new things, but also to improve upon everything we already had. Majd did an stunning job at redoing huge parts of our UI code to make it feel significantly more responsive and faster (especially noticeable on the SE and 5s), making for a smooth ride indeed.