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

Thanks!

Our goal with the app is to give a seamless upgrade to the email experience -- which is why the home page works just like an inbox -- while having writers retain ownership of their list (which therefore gives them exit rights.)

We don't want to be a walled garden. We want to make a great reading experience, with porous boundaries. If you publish on Substack, it goes everywhere - email, the web, other networks, but as the writer you can pull your most valuable audience to the place that you own and can get paid from. If you read on Substack, you can read things on Substack, and then maybe things from other places, like RSS etc. I like the idea of having emails that you can get stuff delivered to.

Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own web hosting company or whatever. On the other hand, there are lots of platforms catering to nudity and sexual content, so I don't think this is going to be a problem there.

In a society where the government isn't allowed to censor, the greatest fear is that speech platforms will become few enough, or homogeneous enough, that particular kinds of legal speech have nowhere to go. Substack provides a home for some speakers who had nowhere else to go, and is therefore decreasing the total amount of censorship that happens in the US.

Some of your "racists and abusers" may be people that others want to read. If you don't like what they're saying, don't read them. If you're going to try to stop me from reading people I want to read, I'll financially support companies that don't let you do that.

Whats the tech stack for the iOS app?

John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid third-party dependencies so native implementation and customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important to us.

Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for cross platform in our case.

(I'm just a random person)

While I agree with the overall message of web over app (and have bugged some of my colleagues for going "App First", locking themselves into particular ecosystems before gaining audience), for consuming content, there are benefits to Apps, when done properly .

Most pertinently, offline content - I will always use Prime/Netflix/Disney in app form rather than Web form.

Offering an app as an option is a brilliant way to meet everybody's needs.

(nagging/pushing an app and deprecating web, however, is devil's work:)