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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

#161

Post by aozgaa »

sachinmonga wrote: post #129
klabb3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 listeni…

How is this different from getting a notification in gmail?

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

#162

Post by pedalpete »

demosthenes714 wrote: post #67
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.

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 c…

Yeah, we've started looking at Kotlin Multi-platform Mobile to keep our business logic cross-platform, but then native UI. The discussion we're having is if it is mature enough for our needs now, or if we write in Flutter with the expectation we throw it all way in the near future.

We all use Android while our users are mostly in single platform approach won't work for us. We're also a hardware company, so need BLE and WebBle support isn't good enough for us.

Thanks for your answer

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

#163

Post by meowface »

zozbot234 wrote: post #159
wpietri wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice. So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support? From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that catego…

Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.

I'm not trying to promote their blog and am not a fan of it and won't link it, but I know of at least one Substack blog by one such actor who indeed makes their blog highly meme-based. The fact that you can insert arbitrary inline images in blog posts and write whatever text you want near them is pretty much all you need.

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

#164

Post by LegitShady »

cgb223 wrote: post #30

Hi Chris, Hamish, Jairaj, and Sachin! I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves. One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my b…

>The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in

Does it? Do people browse medium looking for things to read? Where does the 'baked in' audience come from?

My personal opinion of medium is very different - I usually see it as blogspam.

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

#165

Post by distrill »

sachinmonga wrote: post #106
wildbirds wrote: post #60

I noticed some of the magic of Cocoon when I started up the Substack app. While I hate to see Cocoon get neglected (please keep it alive!), I do love to see the Substack app so well designed. It's a pleasure to use. Well done! Have you ever considered offering subscription packages? I find it hard to justify making multiple paid subscriptions (they add up fast), but would love to be able to build a package of newslet…

Aww, thank you for the kind words. It was fun to get to sneak in some of the Cocoon design patterns here and there throughout the Substack app :) Bundles of some kind are an often-requested feature by both writers and readers. Something we're really mindful of: the direct connection between reader and writer is the magic that makes the whole Substack model work. So we would be very wary of a bundle product that abstr…

serious question: how is this any harder than just "subscribe to n subscriptions for an x% discount"?

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

#167

Post by mizzao »

cjbest wrote: post #54
klabb3 wrote: post #32

A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?

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…

What do you think of readers like feedbin that some folks are outsourcing their email inbox to?

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

#168

Post by cjbest »

mawise wrote: post #143
cjbest wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> maybe things from other places, like RSS etc This is exciting to hear. When I saw the announcement, but my first thought was "They're making an RSS reader that only reads from Substack". If you're actually building a _better reader_ that's bigger than Substack (and doesn't push Substack content too hard) then you've got my support!

Yes we're keen on this. In fact, although you can't add RSS in the app (yet), you can add it on the web at https://reader.substack.com/inbox and it will show up in the app

However, I can't promise that we won't push Substack content. We will :)

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