The Japanese-made Android app FxCamera has been snapped up by compatriot web company Bitcellar in a deal announced this evening in Tokyo. FxCamera claims to be the world’s most-popular photo-filter app in terms of the number of its users, having been downloaded over 15 million times, and is a free app that was developed by Morifumi Yamashita.
The financial terms of the deal have not been revealed, but Bitcellar has revealed that Hokkaido-born Morifumi will join the board of its company and work to expand its development team whilst keeping the FxCamera app going. Bitcellar’s Ryosuke Kawamura, talking to us via email, says that his company is currently not in profit and is self-funded, but it has a monetization strategy:
We have a plan to monetize through the integration between FxCamera and “Cellar” which is our photo cloud storage service, which will be released this month.
Plus, according to the press release, the acquisition will kickstart “plans to provide an iOS app and strengthen the functions of FxCamera to acquire more users.”
FxCamera is a pretty straightforward photo-sharing app, without the ancillary social network that comes with Instagram, the US startup which was acquired by Facebook earlier this week in a somewhat larger deal. But it’s good to see the developer of a quality app getting recognition and some kind of payback as well.
You can find FxCamera on the Play Store.