Faceapp is one of the leading photo and video editing applications that is available for the operating systems Android and iOS. The app is known for its leading-edge features that aid in the exceptional transformation of the portraits according to the user’s choice among the range of features available on the app.
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Who owns Faceapp
The application was developed by a Russian-based company called the Wireless Lab. The CEO of the wildly viral app is Yaroslav Goncharov who holds a Master’s degree in Computer science. Having more than 15 years of hands-on experience with artificial neural networks he is the one responsible for the design of Faceapp. Reportedly he was the co-founder of a company that was sold to Yandex, otherwise known as Russia’s Google. The deal was 38 million which was thought to have made him wealthy.
Features
The numerous options available on the app allows the user to choose editor options such as adding glasses, changing the hair colour or the hairstyle, beard or even transforming the age and gender of a person. The other cool features which are offered by this app are Genderswap, Age filter, Smile filter etc. The app has its own clipart gallery as well.
While there are 28 filters as a whole only 21 features are available in its free version the other 7 are available under the paid version. Among them, the Age Filter got viral and garnered popularity when the celebrities started using it to check out their older and younger versions with #FaceApChallenge and #AgeChallenge as their hashtag.
The app is also available in its Spanish version called Descargar Faceapp Gratis with a cool guide as to how to access the numerous features of the app.
How to use Faceapp
The app has a very user-friendly interface. To begin with, users can edit their photos by either choosing a pic from their gallery or they can take a picture with their phone camera and start editing right away. Effects, collages and drawing are the three types of editing modes that are available. The effect mode lets us add a wide variety of effects to the portraits, the collages mode can be used to mix a few photos into one while the drawing mode allows the user to draw on the picture with their fingers.
AI-based app
The AI-driven application offers more than 60 filters and has top-notch editing software that can beat its competitors in the same segment. The app uses neural networks for morphing and face transformations resulting in impressive and realistic images.
Revenue model
Since its launch, the app has garnered more than 100 million active users. Although the revenue reports are not concrete the app generates its revenue from its premium subscriptions which are $3.99 a month, $19.99 a year, and $39.99 for lifetime access. These subscriptions allow the users to have an ad-free experience, they can get their pictures devoid of the Faceapp watermark, etc.,
Goncharov, the current CEO of Faceapp, said that the app generates the majority of its income from its 1% of paid premium subscribers. The app also drives its income from hosting Google ads.
Controversies
The app had to go through controversies and receive some criticism regarding the privacy concerns of the user data. The app allegedly stored the user pictures for commercial purposes upon their terms of use. To this the CEO, Goncharov responded by saying that the users’ photos are saved for only a limited time when the filters are being used on them and they get deleted from the servers afterwards.
Another controversy the app had faced was racism. The app got itself into trouble with its “hot” transformation feature “Spark” which was presumed to make the users appear more attractive physically. As this feature made the skin of the black people look more like European it was accused of racism. Subsequently, the CEO apologised for this and announced a “complex fix” that was being worked on.
The app even faced a surge of criticism for introducing ethnicity filters White, Black, Asian and Indian which were removed later on.
After going through a lot of controversies the app made it clear that the app uses a third-party cloud provider such as the Google Cloud platform to process and edit the photographs that remain in the cloud for a limited period of 1-2 days that get deleted later on. Also, if the user uses a social media network to login into the Faceapp the app collects the information from the social media platforms of the users such as the first and last names, several friends they have as per the imposed and relevant terms and conditions of these social media apps on the Faceapp.
Wrapping up
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