Apple and Path are close to a reaching a buyout agreement, according to a new report from PandoDaily. The social network app would likely be built into Apple Messages to some degree, although details remain unknown.
According to a single well-placed source inside Apple’s engineering team, the company is poised to announce an acquisition of Dave Morin’s Path social network. To quote our source, who requested to remain anonymous because the deal has not been announced yet, “It’s almost done, if not signed already, but it’s essentially a done deal.”
Path has a lot of ties to Apple in terms of talent leading all the way up the food chain to CEO Dave Morin, who is a former Apple employee. Morin was spotted sitting up front during the iPhone 6/Apple Watch keynote on Tuesday, a place usually reserved for top Apple executives.
Did not forget about Dre. pic.twitter.com/fWNDpFhfYr
— Dave Morin (@davemorin) September 9, 2014
After being on the App Store for several years, Path has struggled to gain traction. While the company claims that its user base has been growing steadily in recent months, its still dwarfed by social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Path started as a network for only your 150 closest friends, but the app has since loosened those restrictions and let you add more people. Its most recent app, Talk, is a private messenger with a few bells and whistles. “Ambient Status” lets the user know when friends are in his or her area, and additional media like music, movies, books, and maps can be shared with friends. Path is also working on a feature called Place Messaging that will let users communicate directly with local businesses to make dinner reservations, book appointments, and more.
In iOS 8, Apple’s Messages app can send quick audio messages, and recent contacts are displayed above the app switcher. It’s easy to imagine Apple making its messaging experience more social, although it’s unclear how Path specifically would help.
But hey, Apple made Ping, so anything’s possible.
Source: PandoDaily
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
One response to “Apple could be eyeing purchase of social networking app Path”
If Apple are bringing path into the fold, it’s not about competing with the dreaded mire of awfulness that is Facebook, or Twitter, which is heading to disaster as its current masters are slowly ruining it, or Google Plus, which everyone hates irrationally for some reason but I enjoy, it’s about giving something to Apple users, for Apple users.
You can iMessage Apple friends, maybe share photostream pics, but with Path as an integrated system, it could be a social glue for Apple users that’s currently lacking. Path would be the layer that adds a depth of social interaction that, while ‘i’ users would benefit, it wouldn’t kill off friends outside the ecosystem, and be a great addition to Apple Watch as well. Path while not wildly popular, that would obviously change drastically with hundreds of millions of Apple users reawakened to it, has a beautiful
simplicity that’s just right as an Apple system.
With Path’s CEO front and centre at the keynote yesterday it’s looking very likely this rumour will play out, time to dust off my path account for my iPhone 6 Plus :-)