SkyDrive gets camera backups on iOS, Facebook previews on the web
Windows Phone owners have long had the option of backing up their photos to SkyDrive, but Microsoft hasn't extended that courtesy to other platforms so far. The company must be feeling a little more generous today …
Context & Ripple Effects
The SkyDrive apps for iPhone and Windows Phone shipped back in December 2011, and Microsoft followed by opening SkyDrive's APIs to any platform in April 2012 — but the flagship feature, automatic camera-roll upload, stayed a Windows Phone exclusive even after the full-res photo and video backup rollout worldwide in May 2013.
With today's update, iOS finally gets the same camera backup Windows Phone owners have had, and the web client gains Facebook photo previews. Pickup across eight outlets — TechCrunch, ZDNet, Business Insider, iMore among them — shows how closely the consumer storage race is watched: camera upload is the stickiest feature a cloud locker has.
First-order effects
- iPhone users can now auto-upload their camera roll to SkyDrive, erasing one of the last software perks that made Windows Phone the preferred client for Microsoft's storage service.
- Facebook previews mean SkyDrive links shared on the social network render as photo cards on the web instead of bare URLs, making sharing more competitive against rivals' native integrations.
Second-order effects
- On iOS, SkyDrive now competes head-to-head with Apple's Photo Stream, Google+, and Dropbox for automatic photo backup — putting pressure on storage quotas and bundle pricing across all four.
- The Facebook tie-in gives Microsoft free distribution inside the world's largest social network, a channel competitors must match or cede.
Third-order effects
- If every major provider ends up offering cross-platform camera backup, the battle shifts from which phone you own to whose ecosystem captures the photo first — locking users in at the point of image capture rather than the point of device purchase.
The trend: Consumer cloud providers are racing to own the camera-roll upload on every operating system, because whoever captures the photo controls the storage relationship.