When former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the promotional images for her new photo-sharing app, Shine, on Tuesday, I thought I was looking at one of the Facebook posts my elderly aunt has a habit of creating. But alas, the person posting was not my aunt, it was Mayer.
As explained by Mayer, the app aims to help people easily create and share photos of trips, parties, or hangouts with friends. Shine does this by creating shared albums, to which you and others can add photos in their original resolution. If you’re too lazy to go through the photos you’ve taken to decide which ones you want to upload, you can turn on the app’s AI-powered “Manual Mode.”
When Manual Mode is selected, Shine’s AI scans your photos, selects the ones it thinks are share-worthy, and asks you to approve the selection. Once you do, the app uploads them to the shared album. There is also a “Magic Mode,” where the AI automatically uploads selected photos to albums. If there are photos it’s not sure about, the AI asks you to review them, according to the app’s description in the App Store.
As someone who frequently forgets to send photos to friends and family, I think Shine has a good idea. Having access to photos in their original resolution is also a great call given that apps like WhatsApp can downgrade photo resolution. Sunshine, the startup behind Shine where Mayer is a co-founder, also appears to take user privacy seriously, stating on its website that it will never sell user data to third parties and does not run ads on its apps.
That
being
said,
the
app’s
design
looks
like
something
from
the
early
2010s.
It’s
very
clunky-looking
and
not
at
all
like
the
apps
we’re
used
to
today.
You
can
definitely
tell
the
app
is
the
brainchild
of
two
former
Yahoo
execs—Mayer
leads
Sunshine
with
Enrique
Muñoz
Torres,
a
former
senior
VP
of
search
and
advertising
at
Yahoo—with
the
purple
color
scheme
and
the
hippie-looking
font.
I wasn’t the only one that noticed.
“Please, can you hire a designer? This app serves a great purpose but its visual design is shockingly bad and outdated,” Bryce Schmidtchen, who works on apps for the Vision Pro at Apple, said in response to Mayer on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Mayer acknowledged that this was an issue and told Schmidtchen to “Please send leads our way,” sharing a link to a job posting for a UI/UX designer.
Given
Mayer’s
response,
it’s
strange
that
she
decided
to
launch
Shine
now
when
she
felt
that
there
was
still
room
to
improve
the
visual
design
of
the
app.
Maybe
Mayer
wanted
to
get
ahead
of
a
competitor
or
simply
test
the
waters
to
see
if
there
was
interest
in
an
app
like
Shine.
While
those
are
good
reasons
to
speed
up
a
launch,
the
look
of
this
app
may
have
doomed
it
from
the
start.
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