Lightbox, one of Android’s photo apps reaching nearly 1 million downloads, launches version 2.0. It features a new photo journal that lets you automatically post photos the Tumblr way, and allows you to organize photos into postcards.
Lightbox eliminates the hassle of having to transfer photos from your phone, edit them on your computer and then upload them. V1 enables you to instantly enhance photos from your Android phone and automatically upload them to Lightbox.com and have them shared to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and Foursquare. V2 makes it even more handy as it auto-creates a timeline from the photos you’ve shared on your personal Lightbox. No need to manually tag the photos or create albums, as they are automatically organized into photo postcards.
V2 also lets you to follow people, regardless of whether they are within your circle of friends or not. Their photo postcards will appear on your Lightbox feed.
Lighbox invested in HTML5 as much as it did on Android to have a richer website for managing photos and browsing the photo feeds from other Lightbox users. The website is optimized for mobile browsers, including Safari on the iPhone and iPad.
Lightbox focuses heavily on Android because of its potential to grow, and the fact that not many developers are building high quality apps for the platform (ahem, Instagram). Lightbox’ efforts are paying off, since it has more Android users than Flickr and Path combined. It also prides itself for being more successful than other Android startups that have bigger venture funding, such as Cooliris with $28M and Path with $11M.
Another Android app called PicPlz has more downloads than Lightbox, but it’s also been around three times longer, with a parent company that has four times the funding as well. Competition is heating up in this arena, leaving Lightbox to contend closely with Instagram, now working on an Android version of their highly popular photo-sharing app.
