[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.