Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

But lets just say it: anyone still on clubhouse is a loser. their credentials are so flimsy that they need bios emoji-fied to keep your attention, or they just enjoy discussing toxic relationships unironically. the only reason this matters is because Clubhouse's allure was how accessible influential people were on it, who have all left, leaving everyone who pretended to be influential still there.

Yeah. Ten weeks for an Android app to meet feature parity with an iOS app that had over a year of development with millions of users is pretty astonishing.

There are many edge cases that come up when something you develop is used by millions of people and they typically get handled as they come up during your growth period. For example, when I worked at FreshBooks over a decade ago we had to support invoicing with currency conversion support for expenses. Some users wanted to input currency costs in the original currency and have us automatically convert it to their native currency, others at the currency conversion they were billed by their native currency via their bank's conversion rate. Still others wanted support for one or the other, but with different reporting flows for either. The fine detail of how to handle different circumstances isn't apparent until you've actually had to deal with it for your customers as they use your application.

So to go from app on platform X to app on platform Y with near feature parity is a lot more work than just slapping something together.

Is every error response handled correctly? Are the user safeguards implemented properly? Does it work across different kinds of devices? Are the third party APIs for payments, etc, wired in correctly? Why does this third party service fail for this new platform at 3% when the existing platform fails at 0.01%? Is every error case handled for every third party service? Is the exception logging wired in properly? Does the backend record misuse correctly despite the fact that the platforms provide different information on request? Does the UI respect the native controls where necessary? During the time from project start to the time when the project finished did we make sure to include all of the features added to the already supported platform?

Anyway, you get the idea. Software MVPs are relatively easy, but quickly launching into an already developed user base takes a great degree of skill, and honestly one of the things I really enjoy about working here is the people and I've worked in tech for a while.

It's amazing to see how quickly a production-grade app can be produced by a team that arrives with the knowledge and experience for connecting the right frameworks and apps together. However, my experience matches the author's in that the hardest work often isn't the technical part:

> And like most engineering projects, the hardest part isn’t necessarily in the technical work! What I found most challenging was context switching into the many different hats I’ve needed to wear: from interviewing and onboarding other engineers to grow the team — talk about building the rocket ship while flying it — to communicating progress and blockers as we went along, and to adjusting to getting to know my new coworkers in a remote world.

It's relatively easy for developers to sit down and write greenfield apps in isolation. It's much harder to sit down and integrate with an existing platform and launch directly into a torrent of users with high expectations, all while navigating the requirements of a rapidly growing business.

As for timing: I'm sure the Clubhouse founders would have preferred to have an Android app ready to go during their initial popularity spike, but I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next.