TriggerTrap, the well-known and widely used smartphone-camera interface is no more. Launched with the aim of creating a remote control to harness the ‘smartness’ of your smartphone, it found favour among many photographers who enjoyed timelapse, long exposure and action photography.
An active TriggerTrap on Flickr group with 2600 members producing a range of interesting and exciting images shows the versatility of the product including, as it did, modes to trigger by sound, vibration and motion, using the speaker, accelerometer and smartphone camera respectively.
TriggerTrap Ada: The Beginning of the End
TheTriggerTrap Ada promised a lot, but never came to market. This resulted in the loss of thousands of pounds of backers money.
A couple of years ago TriggerTrap hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons though. They had launched a Kickstarter campaign for “TriggerTrap Ada” that drew much funding (nearly $500,ooo) and was very eagerly awaited (by me included, because I ordered too) because it promised to be an amazing camera trigger device. The goal was to take the smartphone controls and replace them with dedicated sensors. After many delays, they finally announced Ada would never reach production and the money from the funding had already been spent on development, so backers wouldn’t be getting their money back either. If you missed it at the time, that created a massive firestorm around the web and no doubt greatly damaged the brand loyalty and goodwill that TriggerTrap had.
According to the email sent out today, this failed Kickstarter left TriggerTrap as a struggling company and it has ultimately lead to the announcement of closure today.
TriggerTrap: What Now?
For those of you with TriggerTrap devices, there are questions – what will happen in the future? Will there be app updates and so on? The answers have been provided in an FAQ, but in short, as of today, 31st January 2017, there will be no further technical support, no app development and no app updates. In theory this does mean while your device is currently working, the next time iOS or Android is updated, it may cease to work – as has happened on numerous occasions in the past. TriggerTrap has no solution for this just yet (though they are looking at releasing the software as OpenSource) our suggestion would to take an old iOS or Android device, load TriggerTrap on there and then don’t update it. Although this is a somewhat extreme suggestion as it requires you to either have, or purchase, a smartphone just to keep TriggerTrap going, if it is an integral part of your photographic armoury, then it may be the only solution.
For those of you willing to take on the potential pain of keeping unsupported hardware running, TriggerTrap are having a sale of warehouse stock they have left. Items are selling at less than half price in their TriggerTrap Shop, so could be worth perusing.
This is no doubt a blow to the fans of TriggerTrap and indeed it is always a sad day when a company in the photographic industry goes under, especially when they promised so much. It once again shows the potential pitfalls of hugely successful Kickstarter campaigns though, especially within the tech sector.
RIP TriggerTrap.
Click here to read the full release from TriggerTrap: TriggerTrap announcement useful content.
