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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#33

Post by the_reformation »

Hey guys, big fans of Substack (writer/reader since 2019.)

My favorite part of Substack was how it built on top of email, an (actual) distributed protocol. I'm able to access my Substack writers alongside other writers/publication, since everybody integrates into email.

I like the reader experience of the new app and the recommendations, but I'm worried it will become another walled garden like Medium. How do you plan on protecting against that?

FWIW, Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) has a workaround (albiet complicated) for getting all emails forwarded to app, is that on the roadmap?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#34

Post by happytoexplain »

legalcorrection wrote: post #12

You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?

Parler has a much stronger association with socio-political subcultures that like to say things that are, speaking with a generosity that borders on divinity, "controversial". Substack has cultivated a much less culturally biased/extremist writerbase, to my observation. They seem to have successfully targeted writers who just want to write, and not writers who are specifically the angry and disaffected from one side of one part of the world's political binary.

I.e. I think Substack's content is less likely to violate any rules (though I can only speak with so much confidence, having not read every article on Substack).

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#36

Post by dang »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

Isn't this post abusing Show HN? Since it's essentially just a marketing post and is void of all technical detail? I understand there's an essence of Show HN posts that are marketing but at least most are technically oriented in some way...

I don't think it's abusing Show HN, because they made an app and are sharing it. Actually I told them to make the post say Show HN in the first place.

However, it's true that the /show page is mostly side projects, new companies, and so on. I don't think we need to push the point, so I took Show HN out of the title now.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#37

Post by t00 »

Is it viable to launch an app only for one major platform (iOS), excluding Android with it's payment system entirely? Another question, since I cannot check it - are you collecting payments for subscriptions through the App Store with it's 30% mark? Or are you exempt?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#39

Post by cjbest »

pedalpete wrote: post #6

Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.

We'll get you a real answer about how the tech stack is today.

But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.)

When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many things at once.

Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At least unicode works though :)

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