Bending Spoons, the Parent Company That Now Owns — and Laid Off the Staff of — Filmic
The Impassioned Moderate, a year ago:
News came out a few weeks ago that Bending Spoons, a
consumer app studio, raised a massive $340 million round of
financing. The press gushed about it: “Hollywood star, tech execs
invest in Italian start-up Bending Spoons”, “Ryan Reynolds
invests in ‘terrifying’ Italian start-up Bending”. And Ryan
himself said things that are just so easy to imagine him saying (a
testament to the spectacular job he’s done branding himself):
“Their apps enable anyone to become a creative genius with minimum
effort. In fact, their products terrify me so much, I had to
invest.” (Ironically – or not? – his ad agency is called Maximum
Effort…)
The problem? Bending Spoons is the one the most predatory actors
on the entire App Store – they’re terrifying in a completely
different way.
Bending Spoons’s business model is to buy successful apps, change them to a weekly auto-renewing subscription model that perhaps tricks users into signing up, and using the revenue to buy more apps and repeat the cycle. Filmic, for example, now defaults to a $3/week subscription — over $150/year. To be fair, there’s also a $40/year subscription.
It doesn’t seem like a scam, per se, but it doesn’t seem like a product-driven company. Apps seemingly don’t thrive after acquisition by Bending Spoons — instead, they get bled dry.
It’s a big company with a lot of revenue and that spends a lot of money on App Store and Play Store search ads. (Here’s Tim Cook visiting their office last year.)
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The Impassioned Moderate, a year ago:
News came out a few weeks ago that Bending Spoons, a
consumer app studio, raised a massive $340 million round of
financing. The press gushed about it: “Hollywood star, tech execs
invest in Italian start-up Bending Spoons”, “Ryan Reynolds
invests in ‘terrifying’ Italian start-up Bending”. And Ryan
himself said things that are just so easy to imagine him saying (a
testament to the spectacular job he’s done branding himself):
“Their apps enable anyone to become a creative genius with minimum
effort. In fact, their products terrify me so much, I had to
invest.” (Ironically – or not? – his ad agency is called Maximum
Effort…)
The problem? Bending Spoons is the one the most predatory actors
on the entire App Store – they’re terrifying in a completely
different way.
Bending Spoons’s business model is to buy successful apps, change them to a weekly auto-renewing subscription model that perhaps tricks users into signing up, and using the revenue to buy more apps and repeat the cycle. Filmic, for example, now defaults to a $3/week subscription — over $150/year. To be fair, there’s also a $40/year subscription.
It doesn’t seem like a scam, per se, but it doesn’t seem like a product-driven company. Apps seemingly don’t thrive after acquisition by Bending Spoons — instead, they get bled dry.
It’s a big company with a lot of revenue and that spends a lot of money on App Store and Play Store search ads. (Here’s Tim Cook visiting their office last year.)