Storehouse brings its beautiful storytelling app to iPhone

In February, some design-minded former employees of Apple, Facebook, and The Daily teamed up to create Storehouse: an iPad app that blends beautiful typography, full-bleed photos, video clips, and music into compelling narratives. As of today, Storehouse is also available for iPhone, and it’s using new features in iOS 8 to make sharing easier than before. Using new systemwide sharing features, you can access photos taken inside any app with camera access and share them straight to Storehouse, where you can easily drag and drop images, crop and resize them, and annotate them with captions.

Early adopters on Storehouse used it to show off fashion spreads, publish high-end photography, and document travel experiences. Company co-founder Mark Kawano says he hopes bringing the app to iPhone will encourage more casual creators to post their photos. “The nice thing about user-generated content is that anyone can participate,” he says. The iPhone app is “just a lot more personal and social. We’ve put an emphasis on comments and liking and republishing to streams.” Other features familiar from other social networks include an explore tab, a central feed of stories from the people you follow, and hashtags for stories.

Storehouse’s biggest challenge is convincing people they need yet another endless stream of photos and text on their phones. There are some compelling stories in Storehouse, but it’s not always clear what makes a Storehouse story different from, say, a photo set posted to Tumblr. Kawano is betting that emphasizing more casual sharing will make Storehouse a destination for viewing your friends’ photos. But so does everyone who makes a photo-sharing product. In the meantime, Storehouse is worth checking out for its dead-simple creation tools and polished design. There are lots of apps for sharing media out there, but few of them look as good as this one.