Google Is Finally Letting Android Back Up Photos Without the Cloud. I Built an App for That.

JiantaoFu — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 16:24:45 +0000

This week Google started rolling out something I did not expect to see from Google: automatic photo and video backup from Android phones to a Windows PC, over Quick Share, with no cloud in between. It is in the November Google Play services release notes (version 26.43), and MakeUseOf covered it here.

I am the developer of Lomorage, a home photo backup app, so yes, I have a dog in this fight. But honestly? I read the news and smiled. The biggest company in the photo business just shipped the idea I have been building for years: your photos belong on your own hardware, not on a rented server with a monthly bill.

What Google got right

The old choices were bad. You could pay for cloud storage forever, with 15 GB free and a paywall after that. Or you could plug in a USB cable every few months and copy folders by hand, which in practice means you do it after you have already lost something.

Automatic and local is the correct answer. Your phone notices new photos, sends them to your own computer over your home network, and no subscription is involved. If this feature gets more people thinking about where their photos actually live, it is a good day.

Where it stops

It is a start, not a photo home. A few gaps matter if your household looks anything like mine:

Android phones and Windows PCs only. My family is mixed. Some of us use iPhones, the home computer is not always a Windows box, and the storage I trust most is a NAS. A backup feature that covers half the family is half a backup.
It copies files. It does not organize a life. There is no searching twenty years of photos by face, by place, or by describing the scene. No family accounts, so everyone can back up to the same home library and still keep their own space.
It was never meant to free up your phone. The point of a real backup is that afterwards you can safely delete the big videos from your phone and still find them years later.

What Lomorage does differently

Lomorage is the version of this idea built as a photo home from day one:

Every phone in the house. iPhone and Android both back up automatically over home Wi-Fi, to a Windows PC, a Mac, a NAS, or a Raspberry Pi you already own.
Original quality, kept whole. Full resolution photos and videos, iPhone Live Photos included, with capture details preserved.
Search that runs at home. Describe a scene, search by person or place, even search for words inside screenshots and receipts. The AI search can run on your phone, and nothing has to leave your house.
Made for families. Separate accounts for each family member, one home library. And when your phone fills up, Free Up Space removes the big files that are already safely backed up.
No subscription, ever. The desktop app is free. The phone app is $1.99 once. That is the whole business model.

One honest warning, whichever route you take

Local backup is not magic. Your computer or NAS has to be on and reachable when the backup runs, and a single hard drive at home can still fail. Keep a second copy of the truly irreplaceable photos on another drive. I put the same warning in Lomorage's own FAQ, because a backup tool that oversells itself is just a slower way to lose photos.

The short version

Google moving toward local backup tells you where this is heading. The cloud was a fine place to visit. Your family's memories should live at home.

If you want the whole house covered today, Lomorage is at lomorage.com, or search "Lomorage" in the App Store or Google Play. Set it up on the computer you already have, scan one code from your phone, and tonight's photos will be home by bedtime.

Every Screen Translator Wants a Subscription. Mine Doesn't Exist.

JiantaoFu — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 04:25:21 +0000

Quick note from the dev side: I'm an indie Android developer, and this post is more about the business model than the code — why I shipped my screen translator as a one-time purchase in a category that runs on subscriptions. Originally published on my Medium; sharing it here for the dev community's take.

You're three chapters into a manga that never got an official translation. The raw is right there on your screen — Japanese, untranslated, and the fan translation is six months behind.

So you do what everyone does: you search Google Play for a screen translator. And you find the same deal repeated a dozen times. Free to install. Ads everywhere. And the moment you actually want to use the thing, a paywall: weekly plans, monthly plans, "premium" tiers topping out at $59.99, $99.99 a year to translate text on your own phone.

I build Android apps. When I needed a screen translator for manga and games, I went looking for the one I'd pay for once and own. It didn't exist. So I built it.

First, an honest tour of your options

The built-ins. Google Translate is a camera tool at heart — brilliant at menus and street signs, but to translate a game dialog box you screenshot, leave the game, paste, and come back. Samsung's on-screen translation is genuinely good, but it only exists on recent Galaxy flagships. Apple's Translate has no real-time overlay at all.

The big "free" apps. This is where most people land, and where the meter starts running:

App	Installs	The catch
Translate On Screen (EZ)	10M+	Ads, in-app purchases up to $59.99
Instant Translate On Screen (Sapiens Labs)	5M+	Ads, in-app purchases up to $59.99
Game Translate Master	1M+	Ads, in-app purchases up to $99.99
Gaminik	500K+	In-app purchases up to $59.99
Screen Translate (YoyoDev)	50K+	In-app purchases up to $14.99

None of these numbers come from a hit piece — they're printed on each app's own store page. "Free" here means the download is free. The translation is rented.

Even the privacy-first newcomers do it. Traverba markets itself as the complete on-device alternative — and charges $1.99 a month, forever, for its premium tier. At that rate you pass $4.99 in the third month and keep paying.

The subscription math nobody does. A $4.99/month plan is $60 a year, every year, for as long as you read manga. Over three years that's $180 for a tool whose core job — read pixels, translate text — your phone already does locally.

What I built instead

Screen Translate: Manga, Games is a screen translator with a business model from 2010:

$4.99, once. No subscription. No ads. No "premium" tier waiting behind the features you actually need. You pay less than one month of the big apps' plans, and you're done.
An on-device engine. Translation runs on your phone, offline. Your manga pages, game chats, and messages never leave the device — there's no server collecting what you read. An AI engine is there when you want more natural phrasing and have a connection.
Built for manga and games specifically. Overlay translation that sits on top of the original panel, plus auto-scroll for webtoons and long strips — the two reading formats generic translators handle worst.
50+ languages, aimed at the JP/KR/CN → English direction most scanlation readers actually need.

That's the whole pitch. It does one thing, it does it without a cloud account or a recurring bill, and the price is the price.

The free version, because "trust me" isn't a business model either

If you'd rather try before paying $4.99: Screen Translator Lite is the same translator, free for 5 translations a day, no ads, with a one-time $2.99 unlock if you outgrow the free tier. No subscription there either. (Yes, maintaining two apps with no recurring revenue is exactly as lucrative as it sounds.)

Who this is for

You read raw manga or webtoons and machine translation is good enough to follow the story
You play Japanese/Korean/Chinese mobile games that never got a global release
You're tired of every utility on your phone quietly becoming a monthly bill

It's not for everyone. If you need a camera translator, a voice interpreter, and a document scanner in one app, the suites exist — they'll just charge you rent.

I wanted software you buy. So that's what I sell.

Screen Translate: Manga, Games — $4.99 one-time on Google Play.
Screen Translator Lite — free, same store.

— Jiantao Fu, Lomoware

DEV Community: JiantaoFu