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Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

blog.clubhouse.com

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Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#41

Post by PragmaticPulp »

markdown wrote: post #36
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16

Don't get hung up on the "Clubhouse" part of the headline. This is a good, albeit somewhat sparse, article about building an Android app on a rushed timeframe. 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 is…

> 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. On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism o…

> On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone.

No, like any startup they needed to launch an MVP and iterate. Waiting until everything is available on every platform only makes sense if you have the time and resources, which they didn't. They were a small team with limited resources.

Clubhouse wasn’t explosively popular when it launched. The success came a few months later, at which point they had more people seeking invites than they wanted to allow on to the platform. Focusing on getting something minimal out the door and scaling it up is the right choice.

If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice. Tech enthusiasts and early adopters skew toward iOS by a small margin and iOS is a more predictable platform to develop for because you can count on most of your user base being on the current iOS version. Android is a development minefield by comparison, especially when it comes to audio and video.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#42

Post by PragmaticPulp »

colesantiago wrote: post #28

I'm very curious if there were any reasons or design decisions on why Clubhouse didn't go for React Native from the start? Would it be fair to say they could have gotten to market quicker had they went with RN? Would love someone from the team to elaborate on this as Agora also has RN SDK's as well as Firebase.

I inherited a React Native initiative at a previous job. It was fine for simple things like login screens and settings pages, but as soon as we had to do anything complex (like audio/video) we ended up writing native platform code anyway. Now instead of benefiting from React Native we were writing platform code anyway and paying the React Native tax to integrate it back into the app.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#46

Post by mjmahone17 »

gleenn wrote: post #39
markdown wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism o…

As a former consultant at a company that built many mobile apps, I think that was the norm. Picking either platform and trying to get some traction both focuses your dollars and developer talent on one decent thing that you can iterate ~2x as quickly on (while the app and business are very small) until you figure what you actually want to build. I think this actually applies to many things. I've seen people pick Andr…

A bonus is that you can build out server features a LOT faster when you only have a single app to worry about: you can couple your client and server implementations, and know by just testing on your one client that you haven’t broken it with a server change.

And when you do break things, it’s relatively easy (especially on iPhone where most users upgrade apps quickly) to fix the client, wait for the next release, then remove the unwanted server feature.

Once you have two or more client implementations, you have to keep track of a lot more things, your QA checklist grows, and you therefore need to move more carefully for server upgrades.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#47

Post by taylorhughes »

grishka wrote: post #45

As someone who's built an unofficial Clubhouse Android app[1] with reverse-engineered API in 1.5 days right when Clubhouse was hyped the most, I only have one thing to say: lol, 10 weeks. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Houseclub

> The rest isn't implemented. In particular you can't create and moderate rooms. There's probably a hundred bugs in the existing functionality too.

...

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#48

Post by grishka »

taylorhughes wrote: post #47
grishka wrote: post #45

As someone who's built an unofficial Clubhouse Android app[1] with reverse-engineered API in 1.5 days right when Clubhouse was hyped the most, I only have one thing to say: lol, 10 weeks. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Houseclub

> The rest isn't implemented. In particular you can't create and moderate rooms. There's probably a hundred bugs in the existing functionality too. ...

It would've taken me maybe 2-3 more weeks to add all the missing functionality, handle all edge cases, and polish the UI. There really isn't that much to it. I've participated in Pavel Durov's contests[1] where you had to make a Telegram client in a month given only a networking/database library. (in that particular contest, I skipped the 1st round, so I had to catch up in 2nd)

[1] https://vk.com/wall-55882680_74 (in Russian)

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#49

Post by respondo2134 »

Engineering aspects aside, I couldn't get past the "welcome screen" => "collect phone number" => "validate phone number" flow. Surely I'm a dinosaur when I expect some sort of value before I give you my personal information. I guess this is what disqualifies me from particiapating!
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