Foodies’ photo-sharing service Burpple finally lands on Android

The well-worn cliché among social networking Luddites is that Twitter and the likes are nothing more than tools for dullards wishing to share what they had for breakfast.

Whether you agree with that assertion or not, there’s certainly no denying that people do indeed love sharing words and pictures of their food with one and all, evidenced by the news that OpenTable recently acquired restaurant discovery app Foodspotting for a cool $10m.

Then there’s Burpple, which caters specifically for amateur food-snappers with a service that combines elements of Instagram, Path and Pinterest to showcase daily eats. We first covered the Singapore-based startup last May not long after its iOS app launched, and were on hand to cover a tonne of news on the company, including a $500,000 funding round.

And today, Burpple is finally landing on Android, though it will come with beta tags attached at first.

Burpple belches onto Android

The basic premise of the Android app, as with the iOS incarnation, involves users posting photos of food categorized by boxes (which act like albums) to give some semblance of order to the culinary collections. Location (optional) and date is added to each photo to give it some context for other users, also helping it to be discovered. Burpple even remembers the time and place of photos, which is helpful when posting older food snaps to the service.

The Android launch, as with many mobile apps, has been a long time coming. But in its iOS-only form so far, the company claims that “300,000 food moments” — which it clarifies are photos complete with a description and geotag — have been shared on Burpple from more than 140 countries and 4,000 cities. That’s a two-fold increase since November.

“We’ve been working tirelessly to make this new Android app to share and discover all your food moments in one place,” says Burpple co-founder Dixon Chan. “Today, we release Burpple for Android as a public beta for everyone to test and enjoy.”

So Burpple for Android is still very much in beta mode for now, but the move is an obvious quick-win for a company looking to grow its user base. Indeed, Burpple has followed a similar path to fellow photo-based social network Instagram, which also took its time to land on Android – but we all know what happened next for it.

While any talk of acquisitions are certainly premature, the recent OpenTable/Foodspotting deal and the growing interest in such photo-sharing apps certainly bodes well for the future of Burpple.

“For all our Burpple users, this is a big step forward for the community as a whole,” continues Chan. “When we started working on Burpple, we dreamed of a world connected by food experiences. With the release of Burpple for Android, we’re one step closer to making that goal a reality.”

Burpple for Android is available to download from Google Play for free.

➤ Burpple | Android

Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock