Social blog platform Tumblr now allows users to customize the design of their blog through mobile, whether on iOS or Android apps, using the 3.3 billion design and theme combinations, just as they do on their desktop or laptop devices.
The company made the announcement in a blog post on May 6.
"A thing you'd love to do: customize the way your blog looks in the Tumblr mobile apps. Now you can do that. A header image, a multitude of fonts, an infinity of colors. A bunch of other things. You'd discover 3.3 billion combinations if you were foolish enough to count them," the blog post says.
David Karp founded Tumblr in 2007 to provide a place and space for people to just be themselves, outside and far different from the confines of Flickr and Facebook. Like Twitter, it is also a micro-blogging platform that allows users to share anything such as photos, music, links, videos or quotes from your mobile, browser, email, desktop. It is home to over 183 million blogs and still growing. The company says its users spend 16 minutes on the average on the site for every log-in, considered to be way ahead than any other sites on the web.
"We're allowing customization and theming to occur in mobile apps, which is huge, because mobile takes up half of our total traffic and it's rapidly growing," Tumblr's creative director Peter Vidani said.
The mobile usage is said to be rising by about 124 percent every year, which now covers over 50 percent of the overall engagement of the site.
Although the Yahoo! subsidiary has its earlier version of the blog's mobile app, it doesn't have themes that are in favor or fitting of the single, standard app-wide design. The default app was regarded as nice but "bare," according to Vidani.
With the in-app mobile customization, users have a far better "mobile identity," as the company calls it. Users likewise can show or hide whichever parts of the design or layout they want, especially significant for brands wanting to use a logo instead of an avatar.
The new app customization is under a new feature dubbed as Appearance. Tap the small profile icon that sits next to the name of the blog inside the app, then users can already start customizing the layout and design.
Nevertheless, he insists that the themes on the web remain as is.
"There's always going to be Web themes, and those will still exist. The two will complement each other," he said.
The company says users can get the new Tumblr mobile app on Android or iOS devices, or simply visit the Dashboard and go to the Settings page.
