I must say that Cover could go long road to a medium sized company instead of selling. IMO they sold out way to early. The product was great, it looks like they followed Startup spirit and really invested in this. The concept is also pretty nice and they had huge user base. Endless ways to monetize.
Unless they got really good deal this transaction could be premature...
Cover is joining Twitter
71–75 of 75 posts
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is yet another example of why all startups should have a responsible sunset pledge[1]. The pledge should contain something along the lines of, "If we shut down, we will make it possible to run an instance of our product." That means open-sourcing server code, writing some minimal docs, and probably building some data export APIs. I had the idea before starting Floobits (YC S13 yadda yadda), and of course, we've…
This is yet another example of why all startups should have a responsible sunset pledge Why, exactly? This probably won't be a popular view on HN, but I think a lot of people complain about companies shutting things down for the sake of complaining. Cover was a free, beta application with a very limited number of users. There was no personal data saved by it and no future plans announced. For those users Cover will c…
Exactly. The thing is that they offered FREE service. They made no money from it (at least that's how this appears). They didn't shut down the app, they didn't just close the whole thing. They gave users fair few months to move to another service. Even if it sucks that such quality app/startup will be probably gone soon, its still much better than just shut things and run.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#73Cover is actually good, i use it (just like Aviate) and some people asked me how i did that on my Android.
To bad it's going to die :(
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#74"For now, Cover will remain available in the Play Store while we focus our attention on our work at Twitter. If that changes down the road, we’ll provide another update here." tl;dr: Cover will die a slow, unmaintained death while the former Cover employees work on completely unrelated Twitter projects. Oh well.
This is yet another example of why all startups should have a responsible sunset pledge[1]. The pledge should contain something along the lines of, "If we shut down, we will make it possible to run an instance of our product." That means open-sourcing server code, writing some minimal docs, and probably building some data export APIs. I had the idea before starting Floobits (YC S13 yadda yadda), and of course, we've…
exporting user's data is absolutely the right thing to do.
About open sourcing the code : If the acquiring company sees the "existing" product as IP even if they do not see the product/service making (enough?) money - they may consider the "code" as IP. In such case - the acquired company may not be "legally" allowed to make the code open source.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#75Damn. This was one of the few apps that made me prefer Android over iOS. It's highly likely it's now going to die (the only thing Twitter gains from this is the team, the app has no relevance to them). It also probably means my one major annoyance with the app won't be fixed. It changes to work settings based on location but I work from home. Was hoping they would add a setting to set it to work between certain hours…
Hi, I'm curious to know what features Cover had that you loved?
The simplicity of it was key. I'd previously been excited about Aviate (admittedly a launcher not a lock screen) but it was much too complex to get working perfectly. Cover showed me the apps it thought I needed but allowed me too easily swipe up to see more. It's 'peek' feature was very useful I found and I also liked it's quick task switching (swipe down from status bar to access most recent apps).