Google Silences Bump and Flock. Chirp is an Alternative to Bump

Back in September 2013 the makers of Bump and Flock, two popular photo sharing Apps, were acquired by Google. At the time there was the promise that both Apps would continue. That’s not the case anymore. The Bump team has announced that as of January 31, both Apps will be pulled from App stores and discontinued. Such is the life of a mobile App.

Bump was a simple and elegant solution that allowed users to share photos between smartphones, Tablets and computers by bumping the two together. It worked well. Flock was an App thatcollected photos that users might take at the same location or event and combine them together in collections for those users on their respective devices. The Bump blog says that users will find ways to archive their content on both Apps between now and the end of January when they next open the Apps.

Apple made a play for a similar kind of Bump sharing technology with its AirDrop technology in iOS 7 but it sometimes works and often times doesn’t. This kind of simple sharing makes sharing photos easy and the bumping metaphor actually made incredible sense when it came to moving photos back and forth between users. I actually saw a few folks using Bump at a New Years Even party last night to share photos.

I can’t offer an alternative to Flock as I never used the App. But, if you’re looking for an alternative to Bump I would recommend checking out Chirp. I actually wrote about it awhile back here. Chirp works on iOS or Android and instead of bumping devices together to share photos, contacts, webpages, and other content between users, it uses sound waves to send photos between devices. The makers of Chirp like to say they teach your phone to sing. Yes, it makes a chirping sound when content is being shared. So, unless that annoys you, it is also kind of fun to use as well.

You can pick up Chirp on either the App Store or on Google Play. It is free on both.