Google Acquires Odysee, An App For Private Photo/Video Backup And Sharing, Team Joins Google+
Google may be adding more offline and private sharing features to its Google+ Photos service soon. It has acquired Odysee, an iOS and Android app that let users automatically back up photos …
Context & Ripple Effects
Odysee's pitch — automatic, private backup and sharing of phone photos and videos — lands at Google as an acqui-hire, with the team folded into Google+. It reads as a talent-and-feature buy rather than a standalone product play, coming just months before sources reported Google would unveil a new photo service independent of Google+ at I/O.
That sequencing matters: the Odysee crew arrives inside Google+ precisely as the company prepares to pull photos out of the social network, making this one of the earliest moves in what becomes a string of small-team acquisitions feeding the photo stack, later including video-editing app maker Fly Labs joining the Photos team.
First-order effects
- Odysee's iOS and Android users face migration off an app that will no longer be developed as an independent product, with its automatic private-backup feature set absorbed into Google's own photo offerings under the Google+-affiliated team.
- Google gains a working team versed in cross-platform (iOS and Android) private photo and video sync at exactly the moment it is staffing up the effort that becomes a standalone photo service.
Second-order effects
- The acqui-hire pattern repeats within nine months when Fly Labs' video editing apps are bought into the Photos team — evidence that Google is assembling photo capabilities piecewise through small deals rather than building each feature in-house.
- A photo service decoupled from Google+ changes the competitive frame for consumer backup: private, automatic archiving stops being a niche-app feature and becomes table stakes bundled with a platform account.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal media backup consolidates around platform-level accounts: by 2020 Google extends the same logic beyond photos to contacts and calendar on iOS with a dedicated iPhone backup app, positioning the platform owner as the default custodian of a user's entire phone data set regardless of device maker.
- The trajectory also signals how Google treats social features — capabilities born inside Google+ (sharing, private albums) get harvested into utility products once they can stand alone, a structure that favors single-purpose apps being absorbed rather than competing long-term.
The trend: Consumer photo storage is shifting from independent apps and social-network add-ons toward platform-owned backup services built through serial acqui-hires, with Google pulling photos out of Google+ and eventually across rival platforms.