Aviary, a photo-editing technology company backed by investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, says it is discontinuing work on its photo-editing software development kit for Windows Phone and Windows 8, citing a “lack of general platform traction” for the Microsoft operating systems.
The news was delivered in a message to a user of the Aviary forums, as reported by Windows Phone Central over the weekend. The company, which makes standalone apps in addition to a photo-editing SDK used by other apps, will be focusing on its Android and iOS technologies.
Aviary CEO Tobias Peggs confirmed the news to Engadget but said Aviary “may well jump back in” sometime in 2014. The company brought its technology to Windows Phone in 2012, banking in part on Nokia’s support for high-end camera technology in its Windows Phone devices.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone emerged as a clear No. 3 in the smartphone market in 2013, surpassing Blackberry, but the company still faces an uphill climb to gain traction against Android devices and Apple’s iPhone.
Update, 10 a.m.: We contacted Aviary for comment, and the company’s CEO Tobias Peggs has provided additional information in this blog post and the comments below. He writes, in part:
We launched our SDK product for Windows last March and while we saw some initial pick up… the numbers were dwarfed by our 6,500 partners on iOS, Android and Web. Something wasn’t working. So what we decided to do with Windows this Quarter was pause for breath, actively listen to feedback from the windows developer community, and rethink our approach for 2014. In retrospect, we could have done a clearer job of communicating to the Windows community what we were doing. (Especially, when we cited “lack of platform traction” in our forums, we were not bashing WP8 but talking about the pick up of our own platform on WP8 relative to its runaway success on iOS and Android). But hopefully now this blog post will clear things up.
