Zoe Update 8/31/15
Hi Everyone,
We launched Zoe (Beta) in August 2014 to establish a community where friends could collaborate. Creating short highlight videos (or “Zoes”) enabled us to tell our stories, while remixing them enabled each of us to re-tell those stories from a new perspective. What a ride it’s been!
We listened closely to the community and worked quickly to incorporate your feedback into each update. The ability to download your Zoe, share to Instagram and many more features came as a result. However, the most common request was always increased reliability. Because Zoes were made by servers in the cloud, performance was largely tied to mobile network connections that weren't always reliable enough. When the network connection became intermittent, progress would be lost and people sometimes had to start over. We heard your frustration and continuously worked to overcome network instability.
Over time it’s become clear that providing the best user experience means returning to a local creation model. Zoe will now use the phone’s onboard CPU and GPU to make a video locally on the device, without needing to upload media clips to the cloud. The locally made Zoe can then be shared out to existing social networks like Facebook, Instagram and more. This means vastly increased reliability, and better integration with existing services.
Unfortunately, this also means no more remixing of shared media clips, because those clips lived in the cloud. And because Zoe needs to work with each phone’s unique CPU and GPU, we’re shelving our plans for iOS and non-HTC Android devices in order to focus our development efforts on the hardware we know best.
Since we’re moving toward local creation, Zoe’s cloud services will be discontinued starting August 31st and shut down entirely on September 30th, 2015. During this time, community members can download their existing Zoes through the app and on zoe.com. After September 30th, the only way to create and share a Zoe will be on a supported HTC device. We’re confident that the best user experience for the vast majority will be with a local creation model, and that’s only viable when you can work intimately with the phone’s CPU and GPU. Unfortunately, this means that our non-HTC community members won’t be able to keep using Zoe.
Thanks to each and every one of you who took the time to install Zoe, create and share your highlight videos, and provide us with your feedback. We have learned and grown quite a bit through this process and can’t thank you enough for giving us a shot.
- Zoe Team