After Reaching 35 Million Downloads In Its First Year, Top Android Photo Editing App PicsArt Arrives On iPhone

PicsArt, a bootstrapped mobile startup which forged its success by going Android-first, is today releasing its mobile photo editing application on Apple’s App Store. Since its launch a little over a year ago, PicsArt has already reached 35 million downloads on Google Play. That’s a fairly significant number, considering that photo-sharing leader Instagram crossed the 50-million mark on Android this past October, for instance. In addition, the company tells me that PicsArt today has almost 2 million unique daily users, and is the top application listed in Google Play’s Photography section in all the markets where Google Play is available. It was No. 2 today here in the U.S. (update: it’s now back to No. 1), but these charts fluctuate. Although the app requires no registration before you can use it – allowing users to simply save photos locally or share them on other social networks – 4 million users have registered accounts with PicsArt for sharing within its own community. On Google Play, PicsArt has garnered over 500,000 reviews, and has an average rating of 4.7. (Instagram is 4.6, for what it’s worth, while competitor Adobe Photoshop Express has a 4.0 rating.) Users are drawn to PicsArt for its free photo-editing tools, which rival those found in other paid applications. While no good photo editor would be complete without filters these days – and PicsArt has plenty of those – the app is known for its other more advanced editing tools like photo masks, corrections (adding a tan or whitening teeth), frames, and borders, plus the ability to draw on the photo with various brushes and add graphics, clipart, shapes, and more. It’s somewhat surprising that an app with a more complex feature set has actually done so well on mobile. That’s something that’s not lost on Artavazd Mehrabyan, PicsArt’s co-founder and CTO. “In terms of understanding mobile, [PicsArt is] more like the PC or desktop experience where you have everything in one place,” he explains. That goes against the grain of what typically works on mobile. “It’s much easier to manage an application that is doing one thing than is doing a thousand things,” he says. The company launched the PicsArt photo editing suite in November 2011, following the release of several other single-purpose apps (which are still live in Google Play). It was a big decision, Mehrabyan says, because at the time users seemed to prefer simpler apps. But the team soon found

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