[PragmaticPulp]

Don't get hung up on the "Clubhouse" part of the headline. This is a good, albeit somewhat sparse, article about building an Android app on a rushed timeframe.

It's amazing to see how quickly a production-grade app can be produced by a team that arrives with the knowledge and experience for connecting the right frameworks and apps together. However, my experience matches the author's in that the hardest work often isn't the technical part:

> And like most engineering projects, the hardest part isn’t necessarily in the technical work! What I found most challenging was context switching into the many different hats I’ve needed to wear: from interviewing and onboarding other engineers to grow the team — talk about building the rocket ship while flying it — to communicating progress and blockers as we went along, and to adjusting to getting to know my new coworkers in a remote world.

It's relatively easy for developers to sit down and write greenfield apps in isolation. It's much harder to sit down and integrate with an existing platform and launch directly into a torrent of users with high expectations, all while navigating the requirements of a rapidly growing business.

As for timing: I'm sure the Clubhouse founders would have preferred to have an Android app ready to go during their initial popularity spike, but I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next.

[tomComb]

Given how long it took them to begin the process of creating an Android app one has to wonder whether they were after some sort of exclusivity.

[colordrops]

Clubhouse already feels irrelevant.

[dt3ft]

I tried it a while ago, the content was mostly people selling either themselves or their merchandise (books, courses, schemes). My sample was not just one try, I gave it a whole week. Same faces, same sale schemes. Uninstalled, figured it wasn't for me.

[capableweb]

I think the same is true for all social media. When you initially join, one of two things happen: 1) you find a small niche group of people who are nice and you have something in common with, the platform quickly finds its place in your mind and "Most visited" section of about:newtab OR 2) you get faced with the most generic, get-rich-quick ads/posts/rants and quickly get a sour taste for the entire platform.

Probably HN is the only place I've actually felt (1) while everything else falls into (2) after just a day or two.

[Cederfjard]

Whereas for my wife, Clubhouse is in the former category. It’s interesting to see the juxtaposition between the bashing in tech circles like HN, and the use she gets out of it.

[martin_a]

It is.

My whole (mostly German) LinkedIn bubble was totally hyped for around six weeks.

Since then: Nothing. It's dead, nobody seems to use it anymore.

[void_mint]

> whether they were after some sort of exclusivity.

The only thing the company ever had was (fake, forced, paid) exclusivity. Once that went away people stopped caring (except those that were/are paid to be there, of course).

[markdown]

> I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next.

On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism or merely being poor at arithmetic, but it made no sense whatsoever.

[gleenn]

As a former consultant at a company that built many mobile apps, I think that was the norm. Picking either platform and trying to get some traction both focuses your dollars and developer talent on one decent thing that you can iterate ~2x as quickly on (while the app and business are very small) until you figure what you actually want to build. I think this actually applies to many things. I've seen people pick Android or iPhone apps first based on target demographic, and you might guess wrong, but usually businesses have a decent guess who their target customers are, and it doesn't seem foolish to focus on a small set of customers first.

[mjmahone17]

A bonus is that you can build out server features a LOT faster when you only have a single app to worry about: you can couple your client and server implementations, and know by just testing on your one client that you haven’t broken it with a server change.

And when you do break things, it’s relatively easy (especially on iPhone where most users upgrade apps quickly) to fix the client, wait for the next release, then remove the unwanted server feature.

Once you have two or more client implementations, you have to keep track of a lot more things, your QA checklist grows, and you therefore need to move more carefully for server upgrades.

[BigMajestic]

Why you would build different server features for different client's? Aren't server endpoints supposed to be independent of the client specific implementation?

[markdown]

I agree that that makes sense for most types of apps. Clubhouse isn't one of those cases.

In my country, influencers who had iPhones picked it up, and then promptly dropped it because most of their followers couldn't come to the party.

[Cederfjard]

Well sorry to be blunt, but were they that interested in your country as a market to begin with? It makes more sense to focus on iOS if you mainly target the US, where iPhone has a very large market share.

[markdown]

My country = the entire world outside the US.

Only targeting the US is folly for a social media app. And even there, iOS has only 60% of the market.

[Cederfjard]

Do you know how much disposable income there is in the iPhone-having segment of the US? I’d say that’s a very reasonable target to start with.

Also, other rich countries, like say some north/west European ones, have a large (~50% or more) share of iPhone users as well.

If you need to go to market quickly, it makes sense to start with the trendy people with money, then you can go for the long tail of Android users.

Edit: Clubhouse isn’t an app where it matters whether every single one of your friends and family is on it for it to be useful/entertaining to you. And if you become established in the most desirable segments of some major economies first, you have a good foundation for going after the rest of the world later. There’s no need to try to cater to every single potential user on Earth from the get-go.

[askafriend]

This is wrong.

If you’re building an early stage consumer startup in the US, you should launch first on iOS period. Use that starting point to iterate rapidly to figure out product-market fit and then launch Android.

There is a reason you see the best consumer companies take this route and it’s not because they’re poor at arithmetic.

[Infinitesimus]

There is of course, a feedback cycle here.

If you always default to launching on iOS, don't be surprised if user adoption is further limited when you eventually get around to launching on Android since by then, there would be competing products or you'll have difficulty changing the perception of "this company thinks I'm a 2nd class citizen, why would I bother?"

(Snap faced some of this for a while though I'm not sure what their distribution metrics look like now)

There is also a critical window when launching on multiple platforms. If you wait too long, the brand's "xyz OS only" will stick and opens the door for your competitor to say "We're like that other app but we actually work and sync across all your devices".

[echelon]

Every time I see an app that seems novel or popular that is iOS only, I form a prejudice against it. I've never, as far as I can recall, gone back to Android offerings once they were eventually launched.

Apps are cancer. Apple is the company responsible for this mess.

[void_mint]

It's good for Apple and iOS users that your opinion is mostly irrelevant in this space.

[Doctor_Fegg]

That means favouring bigcos vs small indie shops with the resources to only develop one platform at a time. Your call, but I find that a strange prejudice to choose.

[askafriend]

I’m not going to give away the entire playbook here but there are several very specific reasons why launching iOS first makes sense.

None of the points you raise are real issues. Android is in-fact a second-class citizen and should be prioritized as such.

Again, there is a reason you see consumer companies adopt an iOS first strategy. Experienced founders can tell you why.

By the way, Snap is a $100B+ company - that’s not a great example to make your point. If your product works, people will come - even the ones that claim they won’t. Cross platform competition is not a real concern.

[jorgemf]

"Android is in-fact a second-class citizen"

Not really if you care about number of users:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

[askafriend]

Quantity of users is irrelevant. Obviously Android has more users.

We are specifically talking about launching an early stage consumer startup pre product-market-fit in the US.

[markdown]

For 99.99% of cases I would agree with you. An app like Clubhouse isn't one of them.

[PragmaticPulp]

> On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone.

No, like any startup they needed to launch an MVP and iterate. Waiting until everything is available on every platform only makes sense if you have the time and resources, which they didn't. They were a small team with limited resources.

Clubhouse wasn’t explosively popular when it launched. The success came a few months later, at which point they had more people seeking invites than they wanted to allow on to the platform. Focusing on getting something minimal out the door and scaling it up is the right choice.

If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice. Tech enthusiasts and early adopters skew toward iOS by a small margin and iOS is a more predictable platform to develop for because you can count on most of your user base being on the current iOS version. Android is a development minefield by comparison, especially when it comes to audio and video.

[rvz]

> If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice.

Releasing on both platforms is now the expected choice.

I don't think Clubhouse can get away from the 2010-era excuses, especially when they had a lot of VC backing and plenty of cash in less than a year. They were more than 6 months late and the competitors already copied them entirely. No waiting for invites.

They might have launched much quicker with both iOS and Android had they chose a cross-platform toolkit like React Native or Flutter.

Even the Discord app uses RN and they copied their main features much quicker than Clubhouse could write the Android app and it has worked great for Discord.

By the time Clubhouse finished the Android app and 2 months later removed the invite system. It was beyond too late.

[markdown]

> No, like any startup they needed to launch an MVP and iterate.

I agree, but they didn't. There was no MVP for Android.

> Waiting until everything is available on every platform

Not everything, just an MVP. Wait until you have an MVP on the biggest platform first, and then launch.

> Focusing on getting something minimal out the door and scaling it up is the right choice.

Yup, an MVP on Android and iOS would have been perfect.

> If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice.... Tech enthusiasts and early adopters skew toward ....

Again, this is true for most cases, but not an app like Clubhouse. In most of the world the influencers jumped on it immediately but dropped it like a hot potato when they realised none of the people they wanted to influence could show up to worship them.