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Bump (application)
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Bump
Original authorBump Technologies
Initial releaseMarch 27, 2009; 16 years ago (2009-03-27)
Final release3.5.6 (iOS) (February 14, 2013; 12 years ago (2013-02-14))
3.4.9 (Android) (February 14, 2013; 12 years ago (2013-02-14)) [±]
Operating systemiOS 4.3 and later,
Android 2.2 and later
SizeiOS: 5.6 MB
Android: 7.5 MB
Available inEnglish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish
TypeUtility software
Websitebu.mp

Bump was an iOS and Android mobile app that enabled smartphone users to transfer contact information, photos and files between devices. In 2011, it was #8 on Apple's list of all-time most popular free iPhone apps,[1] and by February 2013 it had been downloaded 125 million times.[2] Its developer, Bump Technologies, shut down the service and discontinued the app on January 31, 2014, after being acquired by Google for Google Photos and Android Camera.[3]

Features

[edit]

Bump sent contact information, photos and files to another device over the internet.[4] Before activating the transfer, each user confirmed what they want to send to the other user.[5] To initiate a transfer, two people physically bumped their phones together. A screen appeared on both users' smartphone displays, allowing them to confirm what they want to send to each other.[6] When two users bumped their phones, software on the phones send a variety of sensor data to an algorithm running on Bump servers, which included the location of the phone, accelerometer readings, IP address, and other sensor readings. The algorithm figured out which two phones felt the same physical bump and then transfers the information between those phones.[7] Bump did not use Near Field Communication.

February 2012 release of Bump 3.0 for iOS, the company streamlined the app to focus on its most frequently used features: contact and photo sharing.[8] Bump 3.0 for Android maintained the features eliminated from the iOS version but moved them behind swipeable layers.[9]

In May 2012, a Bump update enabled users to transfer photos from their phone to their computer via a web service.[10] To initiate a transfer, the user goes to the Bump website on their computer and bumps the smartphone on the computer keyboard's space bar.[11] By December 2012, various Bump updates for iOS and Android had added the abilities to share video, audio, and any files. Users swipe to access those features.[12][13]

In February 2013, an update to the Bump iOS and Android apps enabled users to transfer photos, videos, contacts and other files from a computer to a smartphone and vice versa via a web service. To perform the transfer, users went to the Bump website on their computer and bump the smartphone on the computer keyboard's space bar.[2]

History

[edit]

The underlying idea of a synchronous gesture like bumping two devices for content transfer or pairing them was first conceived by Ken Hinkley of Microsoft Research in 2003.[14] This idea was presented at a user interface and technology conference that same year. The paper proposed the use of accelerometers and a bumping gesture of two devices to enable communication, screen sharing and content transfer between them. Similar to this original concept, the idea for Bump app was conceived by David Lieb, a former employee of Texas Instruments, while he was attending the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for his MBA.[4] While going through the orientation and meeting process of business school, he became frustrated by constantly entering contact information into his iPhone and felt that the process could be improved.[4] His fellow Texas Instruments employees Andy Huibers and Jake Mintz, who was a classmate of Lieb's at the University of Chicago's MBA program,[15] joined Lieb to form Bump Technologies.[4]

Bump Technologies launched in 2008 and is located in Mountain View, Calif.[16] Early funding for the project was provided by startup incubator Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and other angel investors.[17] It gained attention at the CTIA international wireless conference, due to its accessibility and novelty factor.[18] In October 2009, Bump received $3.4m in Series A funding[19] followed in January 2011 with a $16m series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz.[20] Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sits on the company's board.[20]

The Bump app debuted in the Apple iOS App Store in March 2009 and was “one of the apps that helped to define the iPhone” (Harry McCracken, Technologizer).[21] It soon became the billionth download on Apple's App Store.[4] An Android version launched in November 2009.[22] By the time Bump 3.0 for iOS was released in February 2012, the app had been installed 77 million times, with users sharing more than 2 million photos daily.[23] As of February 2013, there had been 125 million Bump app downloads.[2]

Other apps created by Bump Technologies

[edit]

Bump Technologies worked with PayPal in March 2010 to create a PayPal iPhone application.[24] The application, which allows two users to automatically activate an Internet transfer of money between their accounts, found widespread adoption.[24] A similar version was released for Android in August 2010.[25]

The Bump capability in PayPal's apps was removed in March 2012.[26] At that time, Bump Technologies released Bump Pay, an iOS app that lets users transfer money via PayPal by physically bumping two smartphones together.[26] The tool was originally created for the Bump team to use when splitting up restaurant bills.[26] The payment feature was not added to the Bump app because the company “wanted to make it as simple as possible so people understand how this works,” Lieb told ABC News.[27] Bump Pay was the first app from the company's Bump Labs initiative.[28] A goal of Bump Labs is to test new app ideas that may not fit within the main Bump app.[29]

ING Direct added a feature to its iPhone app in 2011 that lets users transfer money to each other using Bump's technology.[30] The feature was later added to its Android app, now called Capital One 360.[31]

In July 2012, Bump Technologies released Flock, an iPhone photo sharing app.[32] An Android version was released in December 2012.[33] Using geolocation data embedded in photos and a user's Facebook connections, Flock finds pictures the user takes while out with friends and family and puts everyone's photos from that event into a single shared album.[34] Users receive a push notification after the event, asking if they want to share their photos with friends who were there in the moment. The app will also scan previous photos in the iPhone camera roll and uncover photos that have yet to be shared. If location services were enabled at the time a photo was taken, Flock allows users to create an album of photos from the past with the friends who were there with them.[34]

Acquisition by Google

[edit]

On September 16, 2013, Bump Technologies announced that it had been acquired by Google.[35] On December 31, 2013, they broke the news that both Bump and Flock would be discontinued so that the team could focus on new projects at Google. The apps were removed from the App Store and Google Play on January 31, 2014. The company subsequently deleted all user data and shut down their servers, thus rendering existing installations of the apps inoperable.[3][36]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Bump (application)

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Bump was a mobile application for iOS and Android devices that enabled users to transfer contact information, photos, files, and other data between smartphones by physically bumping the devices together, leveraging the phone's accelerometer and location services to detect the collision and initiate the exchange.[1][2] Developed by Bump Technologies, a startup founded in 2008 by David Lieb, Andy Huibers, and Jake Mintz in Mountain View, California, the app launched its iOS version in March 2009 and Android version in November 2009.[3][4] The application gained significant popularity, reaching 77 million downloads by February 2012 and over 125 million by early 2013, due to its intuitive, gesture-based sharing mechanism that eliminated the need for manual input or scanning.[5][6] In September 2013, Google acquired Bump Technologies for an undisclosed amount estimated at least $30 million, integrating the team's expertise into its mobile services.[3][2] However, Google discontinued the Bump app along with its companion Flock photo-sharing service in January 2014, redirecting efforts toward broader Android ecosystem improvements without further developing the standalone product.[7][5]

Functionality

Core Features

The Bump application enabled users to share contact information by performing a "bump" gesture with their smartphones, where two devices are gently tapped together. This process relied on the app's use of GPS to identify nearby compatible devices and accelerometer data to detect the physical motion of the bump, allowing the system to match and connect the interacting phones via a central server for secure data exchange.[8][9][10] Beyond contacts, the app supported sharing various files and data types, including photos, web links, and calendar events, facilitating quick transfers between iOS and Android devices without requiring Bluetooth pairing or Wi-Fi setup. Users could select the specific content to share prior to initiating a bump, making it suitable for casual exchanges like sending images from an event or scheduling details.[4][11][12] Additional capabilities extended the app's utility to social and location-based interactions, such as bumping to check into venues by sending location snapshots to contacts or friends, sharing music tracks via integrated links, and comparing mutual Facebook friends to discover common connections. These features enhanced social networking by integrating with platforms like Facebook, allowing users to exchange profiles or friend lists during in-person encounters.[13][12][14] The user interface emphasized simplicity and safety, featuring post-bump confirmation prompts that required users to approve incoming data before it was saved to their device, such as opting to add a new contact or photo. Privacy controls were integrated into settings, enabling users to toggle features like automatic data addition, mutual friend discovery, or selective sharing options to limit exposure of personal information.[15][16] Bump supported seamless cross-platform compatibility, permitting iPhone and Android users to interact and share data effortlessly without compatibility barriers.[17][18]

Technical Mechanism

The Bump application relied on a combination of hardware sensors in smartphones to detect physical interactions between devices. Primarily, the accelerometer was used to capture the motion and force associated with a "bump" gesture, registering sudden changes in acceleration along multiple axes to identify the event.[19] Additionally, GPS functionality provided location data to verify that participating devices were in close physical proximity by calculating overlapping uncertainty regions in their position estimates.[20] This dual-sensor approach ensured that only nearby devices could be considered for matching, leveraging the inherent limitations of GPS accuracy for coarse localization during the bump detection phase.[9] Once a potential bump was detected locally on each device, the sensor data— including timestamps, GPS coordinates, and acceleration metrics—was transmitted to Bump's cloud servers for processing and synchronization. The servers employed a matching algorithm to correlate events across devices by comparing the temporal proximity of timestamps (accounting for clock offsets), spatial overlap in locations, and similarity in force profiles, thereby confirming a mutual bump action between two specific devices.[20] This synchronization step was critical for avoiding false positives, such as unilateral movements or accidental jolts that might occur in crowded environments, as the algorithm required sufficient evidentiary overlap to pair devices reliably.[19] The matching enabled seamless user experiences without direct device-to-device communication during detection.[21] Following successful bump validation, data transfer between matched devices was facilitated through a server-mediated protocol, where shared content such as contacts or photos was uploaded from the originating device and relayed to the recipient via the cloud infrastructure. The app required an active internet connection for this server-based matching and data relay.[9] While the system supported potential direct peer-to-peer transfers post-validation (e.g., via available wireless channels), the primary method relied on this cloud relay to handle cross-platform compatibility between iOS and Android without requiring additional setup like Bluetooth pairing.[20] Communications between devices and servers utilized HTTPS encryption to secure the transmission of sensor data and shared files, protecting against interception; however, in 2010, a temporary lapse occurred due to a backend change where data was sent over unencrypted HTTP, which was promptly fixed.[22] The application mandated enabled location services to access GPS for proximity verification, which sparked early privacy concerns regarding potential background usage of location data beyond active bump sessions.[23] In one reported incident, a software bug in version 2.0.0 inadvertently triggered location access at inappropriate times on certain devices, amplifying user worries about persistent tracking, though the issue was promptly addressed by developers.[23] Optional user confirmation was required post-matching to approve specific shares, such as contacts, adding a layer of manual authentication to mitigate unauthorized exchanges.[20]

History

Founding and Early Development

Bump Technologies was co-founded in the fall of 2008 by David Lieb, Andy Huibers, and Jake Mintz in Mountain View, California.[24] The company emerged from an idea conceived by Lieb during his time at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he sought to streamline contact sharing at networking events by enabling users to exchange information simply by bumping their smartphones together.[25] This concept drew inspiration from the tedium of manually transcribing business cards collected at conferences, aiming to leverage the growing ubiquity of smartphones with built-in accelerometers and other sensors.[26] The initial prototype was developed on nights and weekends, focusing on using the iPhone's sensors to detect physical collisions accurately and pair devices over the cloud for secure data transfer, such as contacts and photos.[25] Early efforts emphasized refining the sensor detection to work reliably in real-world scenarios, including crowded environments where multiple bumps might occur simultaneously. In summer 2009, Bump joined Y Combinator's S09 batch, securing seed funding that supported further iteration and preparation for public release.[27] Following the accelerator program, Bump raised approximately $3 million in Series A funding in October 2009, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from angels including Salesforce's Marc Benioff.[28] The iOS app launched in March 2009 on the Apple App Store, marking one of the platform's early viral successes by capitalizing on the novelty of sensor-based interactions.[4] An Android version followed in November 2009, extending the app's accessibility to a broader mobile audience.[17]

Growth and Milestones

Following its launch, Bump experienced rapid user adoption, driven by its innovative contact-sharing mechanism and word-of-mouth promotion. By August 2011, the app had reached 50 million downloads worldwide, marking a significant milestone in mobile app growth at the time. This figure climbed to 60 million downloads by October 2011, reflecting strong momentum in its second year. In 2012, downloads surpassed 75 million by February and approached 100 million by mid-year, fueled by expanded platform support and feature refinements. By early 2013, specifically March, Bump had achieved 125 million downloads, alongside over 1 billion photos shared through the platform, underscoring its scale as one of the era's leading social sharing apps. Key updates enhanced the app's utility and user engagement during this period. In 2011, Bump introduced photo sharing capabilities, allowing users to exchange images alongside contacts, which broadened its appeal beyond basic networking.[3] The 2012 release of Bump 3.0 integrated with Facebook to enable friend matching, displaying mutual connections upon bumping devices and facilitating easier social discovery without manual searches.[29] By late 2012, the app added file transfer functionality, supporting a wider range of content types like documents and videos. Although music sharing had been available earlier, it was removed in Bump 3.0.[3] Bump formed strategic partnerships to extend its reach into niche use cases. In March 2012, it collaborated with Japan's KDDI Corporation as part of the au Smart Pass service, integrating Bump into a premium mobile subscription bundle to boost adoption in the Asian market.[30] The app operated on a freemium revenue model, available for free download with core features accessible to all users, while in-app purchases unlocked premium options like unlimited file sizes for larger transfers.[31] This approach supported scalability without barriers to entry, though Bump also experimented with adjacent products like Bump Pay in 2012 to diversify income streams.[32] At its peak in 2012, Bump reported over 12 million monthly active users, with daily photo shares exceeding 2 million, indicative of high engagement.[29] Growth was amplified by a strong viral coefficient, as social sharing prompts after each bump encouraged users to invite contacts, creating organic networks and sustaining momentum through peer recommendations.[33]

Related Products

Flock

Flock was released in July 2012 as a companion application to Bump, designed specifically for group-based photo and file sharing among friends and family.[34] It enabled users to create shared albums automatically by detecting photos taken together at the same time and location, supporting groups formed through proximity rather than individual pairwise interactions. An Android version followed in December 2012, expanding accessibility beyond iOS.[35] Unlike Bump, which facilitated one-to-one transfers via physical device collisions using accelerometer and sensor data, Flock emphasized seamless multi-device synchronization and real-time collaboration for collective content.[34] This shift allowed users to "snap and forget" photos during events, with the app later aggregating contributions into private cloud-based albums without interrupting the moment.[36] Key features included automatic album creation from geotagged photos in the device's camera roll, location-based group formation using battery-efficient geofencing and algorithms to identify co-located Facebook friends, and integration with Bump for optional initiation of shares via bumping.[37] Users received push notifications post-event to contribute or view albums, with options to share via private links or post to social networks, prioritizing ease for social gatherings.[34] Flock targeted social events, family outings, and small teams seeking effortless photo pooling.[3] Flock leveraged similar proximity detection principles to Bump but relied primarily on location services rather than physical sensors for group assembly.[36]

Other Bump Technologies Projects

Bump Technologies pursued several experimental initiatives outside of its flagship Bump and Flock applications, focusing on expanding the utility of sensor-based interactions and photo management technologies. One key internal project was Photoroll, an unreleased photo gallery application developed as a redesign of Flock to prioritize photo organization and viewing over sharing. Initiated around 2012-2013, Photoroll aimed to provide a seamless camera roll experience with cloud-based features for photo backup and management, laying the groundwork for advanced organizational tools. Although never publicly launched by Bump, its concepts and codebase directly influenced the development of Google Photos following the 2013 acquisition.[38][39][27] In parallel, Bump Labs, the company's experimental arm, explored bump-enabled payments through the 2012 release of Bump Pay, a standalone iOS app that integrated with PayPal to enable peer-to-peer money transfers via phone bumps. This prototype sought to extend the core bumping mechanism to financial transactions, allowing users to input amounts and confirm exchanges in person without additional hardware like NFC. Despite initial promise, the project faced technical and adoption challenges, including reliance on precise sensor matching, and was abandoned after the acquisition, with no further development at Google.[40][41][42]

Acquisition and Legacy

Google Acquisition

On September 16, 2013, Bump Technologies announced its acquisition by Google in a company blog post, with the financial terms remaining undisclosed but estimated by reports at between $30 million and $40 million.[43][44][45][46] Google's motivations centered on acquiring Bump's specialized expertise in mobile sensor technologies and peer-to-peer device communication, which aligned with efforts to improve Android's file-sharing and proximity-based features, including the development of the Nearby API.[47][30] The deal provided Google access to Bump's innovative approaches for simulating NFC-like interactions without dedicated hardware, enhancing cross-device data exchange capabilities.[44] As part of the integration, the entire Bump team of 25 employees, including co-founders David Lieb, Andy Huibers, and Jake Mintz, joined Google full-time.[43][48] The team, already based in Mountain View, California, integrated into Google's headquarters campus to contribute to core Android development and emerging photo-sharing initiatives.[24] The acquisition also encompassed Bump's patent portfolio, featuring innovations in bump validation, expedited device communication, and gesture-based interactions for data transfer.[30][20]

Shutdown and Impact

On December 31, 2013, Bump Technologies announced the shutdown of the Bump app, stating that it would cease operations effective January 31, 2014, after which the app would be removed from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, and all user data would be deleted.[49] This decision came just four months after Google's acquisition of the company, marking the end of the standalone service that had popularized gesture-based data exchange.[50] The primary reasons for the shutdown stemmed from Google's strategic shift toward internal development priorities, where Bump's underlying technologies were integrated into broader Android ecosystem enhancements rather than sustaining the independent app.[49] Post-acquisition, development on Bump halted as the team transitioned to new projects within Google, amid challenges like monetization difficulties and rising competition from built-in features such as Apple's AirDrop, launched in iOS 7 earlier that year.[2] The closure impacted over 125 million users worldwide who had downloaded the app by early 2013, disrupting a convenient method for sharing contacts, photos, and files via physical device taps.[30] While alternatives like AirDrop provided similar proximity-based sharing for Apple devices, Bump's pioneering use of sensor-driven gestures—combining accelerometers, GPS, and audio cues to simulate NFC without hardware dependency—influenced the evolution of contactless sharing protocols in mobile operating systems.[51] In terms of legacy, Bump's sensor fusion techniques for device detection and data transfer contributed to Google's subsequent innovations in sharing and photo management. The company's unreleased Photoroll app, a photo organization tool in development at the time of acquisition, directly informed the creation of Google Photos, which launched in May 2015 with features emphasizing seamless backup and unlimited high-quality storage—a policy that persisted until June 2021.[27] Additionally, elements of Bump's proximity-sharing technology were integrated into Android's Nearby Share, introduced in 2020 (and rebranded as Quick Share in 2024), enhancing cross-device file exchange without requiring physical contact.[52][53] These integrations underscored Bump's role in advancing intuitive, hardware-agnostic mobile interactions.

References

  1. Google buys wireless sharing app Bump - CBS News
  2. Google Shuts Down Bump After Buying It For At Least $30 Million
  3. Google Buys Bump, a Popular File-Sharing App That Fought to Find ...
  4. Bump App Review | Common Sense Media
  5. Whatever Happened to Bump? - Santa Cruz Works
  6. What Was Bump! and Why Was it Discontinued? - Failory
  7. Bump, Flock apps to be discontinued - Phys.org
  8. Bump app draws buzz at CTIA - Computerworld
  9. How does "bump" technology work? - Stack Overflow
  10. Bump, Throw, and Catch Files Between Mobile Devices
  11. Google buys smartphone file-swapping app Bump as sharing grows
  12. Use Bump to share files between your phone and computer - CNET
  13. Bump Quickly Transfers Music, Contacts, and Photos Between ...
  14. Bump iPhone app now lets you send “location snapshots” to friends
  15. Bump™ from Bump Technologies - Here's How You Bump - YouTube
  16. Bump 3.0 for iOS simplifies UI, removes music and calendar sharing ...
  17. More with less: Why Bump, others kick features to the curb - CNET
  18. Bump Goes Cross-Platform With New Android App - TechCrunch
  19. Bump - App on Amazon Appstore
  20. [PDF] The Exploitation of a Popular Accelerometer-Based Smart Phone ...
  21. US20110191823A1 - Bump validation - Google Patents
  22. An Introduction to the Bump API for iOS Applications - AUC
  23. Popular data exchange app “Bump” suffers security lapse - SC Media
  24. Bump app - XDA Forums
  25. Bump Technologies - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding
  26. (Founder Stories) Bump's David Lieb On Getting To 60 Million ...
  27. Business cards hold on despite Bump Technologies
  28. Bump, Flock, Photoroll (unreleased) => Google Photos - Y Combinator
  29. Bump Technologies Confirms Sequoia Funding, Reveals Roster Of ...
  30. Death To Feature Creep! Bump 3.0 Dumps All But Contacts and ...
  31. Bump Mobile Contact Sharing App Acquired By Google, Will Stay ...
  32. The Bump App Now Belongs To Google - Fast Company
  33. https://blog.bu.mp/post/40279584942/introducing-bump-pay-a-new-project-and-app-fr
  34. Bump hits 50 million downloads with 10 million active bumpers
  35. Bump's New App Flock Creates Shared Photo Albums With Friends ...
  36. Bump team launches Flock, the stupidly simple solution for group ...
  37. The Team Behind Bump Aims To Crack Photo Sharing On Smart ...
  38. Meet David Lieb, Y Combinator's newest secret weapon
  39. Getting to know YC's newest Group Partner, David Lieb | Y Combinator
  40. Bump Pay Lets You PayPal Someone With A Tap, But Only In-Person
  41. Bump Pay will let users exchange money by bumping smartphones
  42. Bump now lets you hand out money by tapping your phone
  43. From Startup Bigshot To Big Tech Hotshot: David Lieb's Bumpy Ride ...
  44. We're excited to announce that the Bump team is... - Bump Blog
  45. Google buys faux-NFC app Bump for a reported $30 million, or more
  46. Google acquires Bump for US$30m - Companies | siliconrepublic.com
  47. Google makes multi-million Bump investment - Marketing Week
  48. Google acquires Bump, a startup that enables devices to wirelessly ...
  49. Bump Technologies 2025 Company Profile - PitchBook
  50. Google To Close Bump And Flock, Its Recently Acquired File ...
  51. Google-acquired Bump shutting down this month - The Verge
  52. https://www.appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/02/google-to-resurrect-bump-app-as-copresence-like-apples-airdrop-without-privacy
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