Frontback brings two-sided selfies to Android

Eight-month-old pseudo selfie app Frontback is spreading its two-sided photos to a new audience with the Wednesday release of an application for Android.

Launched last summer on iPhone, Frontback is an app for snapping a photo, first with your smartphone's front camera, then with your back camera. The finished product, which can be shared to other social networks, is a split image with two perspectives. Though simple in purpose, the app recently surpassed 1 million downloads with users viewing more than 17 million photos in March alone, the company disclosed Wednesday.

Frontback for Android, available from the Google Play store, comes with all of the iOS application's main features including the primary feed of images from friends, a discover section to explore popular photos, user profiles, a self-timer, and notifications. The application also includes an Android-only feature called offline mode that still allows for double-camera captures when you're without an Internet connection.

Based in San Francisco, Frontback is an eight-person company run by founder and CEO Frederic della Faille. Della Faille originally set out to build a social photo app of a different kind but happened upon the Frontback idea after the other venture, Checkthis, flopped.

Frontback has raised $3.2 million in seed funding from SV Angel, CrunchFund, Index Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and several angel investors. The company, now focused on the community and creative aspects of its app, is rumored to have rejected a buyout offer from Twitter in the fall of 2013, prior to Twitter's public offering. It's hard to say whether the decision was a wise one, but with more than half of its users having come in the past eight weeks, Frontback is proving itself to be more than a passing fad.

Coincidence or otherwise, the Frontback news comes just a few days after another young, semi-popular selfie app, Shots, said that it had passed 1 million users. Viva la selfie?