Earlier today, HTC announced that it’s discontinuing its One Gallery Android app this Saturday, April 30th. In other words, the app which allowed its users to merge their photos and videos from the native HTC Gallery with ones from various cloud storage services will be pulled from Google Play Store and unavailable for download as of next month, i.e. this Sunday. No official reasoning has been given for this decision, but there’s speculation about the Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturer giving up on supporting One Gallery because it simply wasn’t used by a significant amount of the company’s customers.
According to the information listed on the app’s Play Store page, it had between one and five million installs since it launched several years ago. While a seven-figure number of installs can’t exactly be called “small” per se, it does seem that way in the context of the main HTC Gallery app being downloaded between 10 and 50 million times. Speaking of which, the Taiwanese company is assuring its customers that the HTC Gallery isn’t going anywhere and that this decision solely pertains to the One Gallery app. So, HTC users who enjoyed the ability to instantly view all of their local and online multimedia content are out of luck. It’s worth noting that this service didn’t actually allow for upload of local content to various cloud services, so it was only useful in the context of providing a quick and simple way to view all of one’s captured photos and videos. While that may not seem like much, most of the users who understood what it does and bothered to leave a review on its Play Store page were relatively satisfied with it.
It remains to be seen whether HTC will decide to offer a similar integrated view in its gallery app in the near future, but that doesn’t seem likely at the moment. Luckily, there isn’t a shortage of quality photo management apps on the Play Store to choose from and as most of them offer an integrated experience similar to the one featured by One Gallery, the majority of HTC users probably won’t be too troubled with this discontinuation.