Guess I called it.
I just got the email last week that Lyve is shutting down. It started as a somewhat unique proposition around owning your own storage and interface around photos, which eventually had to be sold to a hardware maker — Seagate — to stay afloat, but couldn’t quite make headway in the face of Google and Apple[1] jumping onto photo storage and management.
Somewhere a year or two into the initial introduction of Lyve, the company ran into the same problems that virtually all hardware products run into: making a profit on hardware is theoretically possible , but the logistics require scales of economy unavailable to all but the largest hardware manufacturers. Making it to production and sales is just the first step; the hardware must be continually iterated and revised, while the software counterparts race to stay in-sync.
In Lyve’s case, their hard drive + screen box was ahead of its time when it was first built, but was quickly superseded by a number of cloud services that were easier to set up and enjoyed their namesake advantage of being available everywhere on all devices. In particular, Apple and Google form a duopoly in mobile operating systems, and the tight integration there is enough to push almost everyone else out of the market.
They tried to lean more into a photos storage service, but that’s a well-trodden path littered with the skeletons of dead startups. Worse, that veered them away from their initial premise: owning your photos locally was a hedge against online services shutting down. Lyve made online accounts mandatory, and started to keep as much info on their own servers as their Lyve boxes; now that shutdown is imminent, there’s no way to keep a local setup running and backing up photos, and the best they can do is a manual file transfer onto an external hard drive.
The silver lining here may be that while Lyve is yet another photos startup outcompeted by a tech giant, photos have become a core part of smartphones. There’s little risk in Apple and Google renouncing support for their photos capabilities, not while their flagship phones are still trying to one-up one another on their camera hardware. We are still in a much better place in photos management and maintenance than a few years ago, even if Lyve won’t be an option in the future.
And to a lesser extent, Dropbox and Amazon. ↩︎