How to Make Your Own Photo Editing App like PicsArt

Photography is mainstream these days. Difficult to argue, isn’t it? Whether it’s a travel, a party or just a dinner in a fancy restaurant, expect a dozen photos in your social media feed.

However, people usually want to share only the best photos they’ve got. And how can you make a photo better? By editing it!

According to Statista, about 45% of Americans use photography editing apps for Android and iOS. It turns photo editing app development into a perspective industry. Let’s start with figuring out 2 main types of applications you can build.

📱 2 Types of Photo Editing Apps

The first advice we can give you on how to make a photo editing app is to clearly decide on the type of application you’re building. It defines the scope of work and the list of features you’ll need to build an MVP.

Basically, you can divide all the editing applications into 2 categories:

• photo editing apps — Google Snapseed, Retrica, Prisma;
• social photo editing apps — PicsArt, VSCO.

What’s the difference? While both groups are quite similar in terms of their editing capabilities, social photo editing apps also involve user interactions within the app. In other words, users can share their own photos in the app as well as view, comment and like photos of others.

# 4: Push notifications 🔔

Also, we recommend adding push notifications so as to retarget users that haven’t used the app for a while. But you may also use it to interact with your active audience as well.

For instance, you may notify users when they reach a specific amount of likes or when they get new followers. Moreover, using push notifications can be used to promote new effect packs, filters, stickers and any other content that can be a part of your monetization strategy.

🛠 Tech Stack

What technical tools will help you build a photo editing application for iOS or Android? Check these few:

• If you're looking for a cloud storage to keep users data, you can use Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure.
• To implement the Social Login feature use APIs of such social media as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
• Push Notifications can be implemented with the help of services like Amazon SNS, Urban Airship, OneSignal or Firebase Cloud Messaging.
• The Facebook Mobile SDK can be useful in a few different ways: from providing customer support via Messenger to setting up monetization or gathering analytics.

💡 Takeaways

So this was our brief guide on how to make a photo editing app for Android or iOS.

This industry is quite perspective but challenging as well. The good news is that you don’t have to spend resources on checking whether the market exists at all and developing it from scratch. The bad news is that you’ll likely face tough competition and therefore need to pick a niche.

So how to make a photo editing app in 3 simple steps?