Midjourney’s first mobile app is here…sort of

Bootstrapped startup Midjourney presents a well-liked text-to-image AI generator from its personal basis mannequin. Since its beta launch in the summertime of 2022, it has constructed a thriving neighborhood of customers on its official server inside the separate messaging app Discord — exceeding 16 million on the time of this text’s publication, together with VentureBeat (we use it and different AI artwork mills as an example articles).

To this present day, greater than a 12 months later, Discord stays the first means by which customers can work together with Midjourney — they merely kind in a textual content prompts to the Midjourney Bot in Discord, which in flip, produces quartets of generated pictures for the person to select from, obtain, remix, edit sections of, pan over, or in any other case iterate on.

Nonetheless, as of this week, Midjourney is now out there in its personal cellular app…kind of. Based on founder David Holz, a former co-founder of Leap Movement and NASA researcher, who spoke at Midjourney’s common weekly “Workplace Hours” audio convention held inside Discord, Midjourney partnered with engineers from Japanese sport firm Sizigi Studios to launch Niji Journey, an Android and iOS app.

Holz stated Niji Journey was constructed for the Japanese market specifically and was centered on offering pictures utilizing Midjourney’s anime artwork type setting, also called “Niji.”

The journey to Niji Journey

The Niji Journey app is accessible for obtain now on each the Google Play and Apple App Stores without cost with in-app purchases. It nonetheless requires a paid subscription through Midjourney to make use of (the most cost effective tier is $8 a month paid as a lump sum annual cost of $96, or $10 a month paid month-to-month). Present Midjourney subscribers can log into it utilizing their Discord credentials with out paying extra.

Holz advised the attendees of the Midjourney Workplace Hours name right this moment that the Midjourney workforce — which consists of just a few dozen workers — had determined to associate with Sigizi Studios (identified variously as Spellbrush and Waifu Labs, makers of the AI anime sport Arrowmancer), as a result of Japanese customers have been extra accustomed to interacting with cellular apps than desktop for software program, and had discovered Midjourney’s Discord Bot to be not as person pleasant as they want.

Holz famous that the Niji Journey app was in a position to produce non-Niji pictures in Midjourney, permitting customers to entry the complete vary of artwork types out there by the AI generator, just by deciding on “v5” within the Niji Journey app’s settings — one thing noticed by customers on X (previously Twitter).

Holz stated that Niji Journey was deliberately extra information-dense and “busy” in its person interfaces than the Midjourney Discord implementation or different “Western” app design conventions, as a result of the Japanese market prioritized granular controls over simplicity or minimalism.

A full-fledged Midjourney app is coming…sometime

Holz invited present Midjourney customers to check out Niji Journey and supply suggestions. But, he was clear in saying that Midjourney deliberate to in the end launch its personal stand-alone app in the future, however didn’t present a timeline as to when it could possibly be anticipated.

He talked about that that cellular app economics at current didn’t sometimes help providers as costly as Midjourney, and stated he and his workforce have been fascinated with how finest to create an onboarding expertise for brand spanking new customers ought to they launch a stand-alone cellular app.

Throughout his discuss, Holz talked about that Midjourney deliberate to launch two main new options this week — a local upscaler for rising the decision to 4000 by 4000 pixels, in addition to a customized type setting in order that customers may make their very own type to use to all picture generations going ahead, comparable in a option to the customized directions out there in OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He cautioned that each options have been nonetheless experimental and had not carried out as much as the workforce’s excessive requirements, however have been nonetheless ok to be launched quickly and would hopefully be satisfying and helpful to Midjourney’s subscribers.

Holz additional said that Midjourney can be pushing out an improve to its web site quickly as properly, offering extra options for viewing generated pictures and sharing them on social. He stated this replace would happen in two phases.

Midjourney has gained an enormous following regardless of the technical hoops that customers should undergo to get began, partly as a result of the imagery it generates is so top quality and fascinating.

However with the rise of high-quality picture producing AI options together with OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 baked into ChatGPT Plus, and Adobe’s current launch of Firefly Picture 2, to not point out opponents similar to Ideogram that may produce typography way more reliably and precisely than Midjourney, the launch of the Niji Journey cellular app couldn’t come sooner. And it stays to be seen if Midjourney’s normal stagger-step, iterative, endearingly scrappy strategy towards releasing new user-facing services will enable it to take care of the spectacular userbase it has constructed to date, particularly with the strain of extra well-funded and easier-to-use competitors.