Funky Photo-Filter App Vida Brings the Photo-Grunging to Android As Well As iPhone

The Chinese startup Vida has launched an Android version of its photo-sharing app, giving it a cross-platform cousin to its iPhone variant. Vida is perhaps the funkiest of all the locally-made photo-filter services, with a minimal UI whose colour accents can be easily changed to that of any hue under the sun. Yes, you don’t need to use it in pink.

Quite uniquely, the app uses live filters – 18 in total right now – so what you see on screen as you set up the shot is what the final image will look like. While that lets you pick out the right filter for the circumstances, it also means that you can’t undo what you’ve just snapped. Also quite unusual is the way photos are presented in horizontal tiles beside a date, which I think makes for a nice way of looking back through someone’s photos.

Trying out two different filters in the Vida app. The 'matrix' one, on the right, is pretty freaky (in a good way).

Vida allows third-party sign-up via either Sina Weibo or Douban. For the time being, only those two networks can be shared to as well, which leaves Tencent Weibo and some other social media out of the party.

Vida’s Kevin Song tells PO that the new Android version will soon get video-sharing support as well, to bring it onto a level with the iPhone app. That first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing at the start of November, where the Vida team was a finalist in the Startup Battlefield.

The startup is now made up of, Kevin tells us, ten people – “most of them are engineers who used to work in tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Google.”

Grab the brand-new version of Vida for Android from the Market, or try the iPhone one from iTunes.