Photo-sharing startup Retro spots Google Photos copying its idea and design

Retro CEO Nathan Sharp isn’t worrying just yet about Google’s plan to copy his app’s experience, despite the numerous similarities. However, he noted that in addition to making the user’s week the main unit for the photo journal, Google Photos’ design also looks a lot like Retro. Like his app, the Google Photos journal is displayed in a horizontal “filmstrip”-style format, with rounded corners on the outside.

Still, Sharp said, Google’s product is not yet public and could change.

“We’ve worked inside of big companies as well, and we know that a lot of there’s a lot of testing going on inside, and oftentimes those are rough and they change dramatically before they ship,” Sharp said. Before building Retro, he and Olson — the co-founder of Retro’s parent company, Lone Palm Labs — had worked together at Instagram and understand what it’s like to be on the other side of things.

“At first, when you see this, it does make you a little angry, because it seems like some things are lifted one to one. But … this isn’t what they’re shipping,” he explained. “They aren’t asking to be judged on what’s on Twitter today. So I have to kind of step back and say, this is probably a team in progress.”

If the feature does ship, Sharp says he won’t underestimate Google’s potential to compete in his space space — and “potentially with the same exact designs.” But he does think Retro users may appreciate that the app serves a specific purpose — that is, one that’s dedicated to catching up with friends and family.

That, he says, is very different from an app you use to store “every single photo and screenshot you’ve ever had,” as well as edit those, and free up storage space on your phone, which are the primary use cases for Google Photos.

“One of the things with Retro is that we have a unique approach — both to the product but also the ethos of things,” Sharp said. “On Retro, your photos are incredibly private. We don’t we don’t sell or rent or user data to anybody. We aren’t an ad-driven model. We don’t have a public feed of people that are trying to build audiences, so you don’t run into distractions outside of family and friends. We don’t train AI models on any of your photos. I think the simplicity and the focus of that still helps us differentiate from any kind of bigger multi-use case app.”

Retro continues to push out new features to cater to this audience, as well. It launched collaborative journals and the ability to send photo postcards directly in the app, even if you don’t know your friend’s address. Instead, the app will simply prompt the friend to enter their address to receive the postcard, but the address itself remains private. Plus, on Android, users can now send postcards directly from the camera roll itself. (And because Retro hasn’t yet built out the payment flow, the feature is free to use.)

The startup is also working to bring its widget to iOS, which would allow users to customize their iPhone’s Home Screen, and it’s developing a feature to enable direct sharing with “keyholders,” or people who’ve been given access to a user’s entire photo archive, not just photos from the past month.

Eventually, Retro will look to monetize by offering a premium subscription, but nothing has rolled out on that front as of yet.