Apps you’ve panicked in your day: QuickPic

In this series, we remember apps from the past that were very popular back then and which we don’t hear much about today. After remembering Link Bubble, Fring, and Advanced Task Killer, today we remember one of the most famous gallery apps of all time: QuickPic.

If you have been on Android for a while, it is quite possible that you are familiar with QuickPic, because it stands out for its lightness, its many options and its very efficient operation even on very modest terminals. He seemed to have a bright future ahead of him, until Cheetah Mobile crossed his path. What happened to QuickPic?

What was special about it?

In 2012, we named QuickPic the most popular gallery app on Android. All Android phones include their own gallery app – back then simply called Gallery– which is sufficient in most cases. When the gallery app provided on your mobile did not convince you, the best alternative was QuickPic.

Its advantages included being free, very light and has a lot of options, running smoothly in both powerful and basic terminals. It looked good in the days of Holo and it served its purpose: to be able to view photos and videos from your mobile, quickly and according to your preferences.

QuickPic had features that even today are not easy to find in similar apps, such as three types of views (stacked, mosaic, and list), color themes, screen rotation control , a grid background for transparent images, choose an image from an album, hide folders and many other options. It had seven categories in its settings menu.

In summary, QuickPic represented three characteristics that create buzz in Android applications: free, lightweight and highly customizable. So it’s no wonder that it has surpassed 10 million downloads, despite being an alternative to an app that all mobile phones have preinstalled.

What happened to QuickPic?

Its international fame would take a while to take off, but QuickPic was born as a gallery app for Android almost at the same time as the operating system itself, somewhere in 2010. It was less polished visually, but older versions of QuickPic weren’t much different from the gallery app that would gain worldwide fame. By the way, the full name of the app was Fast image browser.

QuickPic was created by Chinese developer Nanling Zheng and over time has harvested more and more features and options, implementing many of the suggestions he received in his development blog. Over time and word of mouth, the application has become in the following years a kind of standard for third-party gallery apps.

Everything seemed to be going better and better for QuickPic, so much so that in 2014 it ventured to integrate into different cloud storage systems to make it easier to back up your photos, as well as make the leap to material design, with different color themes.

Then in August 2015 Cheetah Mobile adquiría QuickPic, causing a good part of his followers to start worrying about his future. At the time, Cheetah Mobile’s reputation began to deteriorate after most of its apps, such as Clean Master, included various lies, hoaxes, and exaggerations to guide the user in the direction that was best for them.

As is often the case in similar situations, the original QuickPic development team tried to calm things down by ensuring that the same team would continue working on the app and that no announcements or task managers would not be included soon, as in other Cheetah apps. . In subsequent updates started on cheetah by QuickPic, with up to 5 GB of cloud storage.

Controversy had accompanied Cheetah Mobile prior to purchasing QuickPic, with accusations by security researchers of using deceptive ads to lure users to Clean Master, although the worst came in 2018, with the download attribution fraud that rocked Google Play.

The fraud consisted of apps that spied when the user installed an app and later marked the goal, signaling to companies running ads that the installation was due to a banner or their own recommendation. In 2018, Google removed QuickPic from Google Play for this reason, although it did not take long to return.

Cheetah Mobile and QuickPic’s reputation was badly damaged in the following months, but the app remained available in the store until February 2020, when Google ran out of patience: banned Cheetah Mobile and removed all of its apps from Google Play. The final reason for the ban never appeared.

Since then, QuickPic is no longer on Google Play, although, as happens more often than we would like, they are not missing from the Google Store. fake QuickPic clones, with the same or similar icon. It is not recommended to install any of them: better bet on one of the gallery apps we recommend.

Does it still make sense today?

Nowadays, mobiles are more powerful and gallery apps have a few more options, so there is less need to install a third-party gallery app. However, there is still interest in a good alternative to the gallery app it is still valid. So much so that even Google ended up launching its own alternative to Google Photos under the name of Gallery Go.

The best way to describe that the interest in an app similar to QuickPic is still alive is that after the Cheetah Mobile debacle, the XDA community decided to create one. modified version of QuickPic which remains a popular alternative today, under the name QuickPic Classic.

QuickPic is dead, but the concept of the app alternative to the one supplied with the mobile, but better, more complete, lighter or simply different, it is still one of the pillars that make Android, Android. If you don’t like something, you can change it for something better. And I hope you won’t buy it and destroy Cheetah Mobile.