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

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

#121

Post by onefuncman »

cjbest wrote: post #39
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 i…

A few (but not too many) years ago I inherited a custom compilation of python2.x to make unicode strings work properly. You made the right call, lol.

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

#123

Post by wpietri »

kradeelav wrote: post #75
wpietri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'm asking about the former. Does that work even for paid subscriptions? I was thinking it would require some sort of separate URL.

I'm obviously not who you're replying to, but I exclusively read substack articles through RSS readers like inoreader - typically every article (both paid and unpaid) will show up in the feed; the paid articles are just paywalled after the title/image/short paragraph preview. Hope that helps.

Good to know, thanks! In that case, my question for the Substack folks is:

For Substack authors that I subscribe to, will you be making a full-content feed available? I'm quite happy with my current feed reader, and would just like to get my substack subscriptions in there like my other full-content subscriptions.

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

#124

Post by micromacrofoot »

rileymat2 wrote: post #94
Ologn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.

To clarify, for the good of the user or for their own purposes?

definitely their own purposes; show me a company that makes an app that tracks users less than the web alternative

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

#125

Post by jfornear »

Readability has improved with the latest typography updates. App looks nice. I mostly read emails but find some newsletters get annoying with too many low-quality updates. I wonder if you could test throttling email notifications for newsletters with low open rates, etc.

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

#126

Post by monocularvision »

demosthenes714 wrote: post #71
Austin_Conlon wrote: post #44

What’s the general breakdown of use between UIKit and SwiftUI?

John here, one of the iOS engineers. We're 100% UIKit but keeping a close eye on SwiftUI. It's certainly beautiful

As an iOS developer, I scrolled down to find if there was any mention of tech and I am glad to find it! I have to say, I was taken by surprise by the launch because as a huge fan of Substack I was always watching the career boards and never saw anything except web and backend engineers. Can you talk about the size of your team or is it just you?

One feature request: would love to be able to collapse comments/replies like you can do on the web.

Thanks for the great app!

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

#127

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

shortformblog wrote: post #102

I’m sure that you probably know my opinion on all this already (given my general loudness about newsletter things in general, as the editor of Tedium), but I’d love to see you offer options to create ecosystem options that don’t rely on having to publish on Substack proper. It seems like creators could use the support of something like Substack without being tied to the publishing platform itself. That seems like a r…

Ghost[0] Seems like it more or less fits what you're describing. I first heard about it on an episode of Indie Hackers.[1] It was an especially interesting and unusual episode. I remember him talking about positioning with open source and also him going on these crazy international sailing trips while running the company.

Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of all time![2]

[0] https://ghost.org/

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...

[2] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...

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

#128

Post by ubac »

You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?

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

#129

Post by sachinmonga »

klabb3 wrote: post #88
cjbest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read in mobile: they discover stuff to read on the web through links that get shared, but once they sign up they overwhelmingly read in their email client. Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are…

> developing for email is still a pretty big pain. I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it. > But there are limits to what you can do [in email] But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email. As a user I don't mind an app fr…

> As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?

A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listening in a web player (on mobile) is a pretty sub-par experience.

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