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I had a VC friend who switched to an iPhone, from Android, because of FOMO on Clubhouse. Now, after he realized that Clubhouse has naturally degenerated into a bunch of random people spouting off, with only a few rare pockets of quality content, he won't admit he switched to iPhone because of Clubhouse.
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This is wrong. If you’re building an early stage consumer startup in the US, you should launch first on iOS period. Use that starting point to iterate rapidly to figure out product-market fit and then launch Android. There is a reason you see the best consumer companies take this route and it’s not because they’re poor at arithmetic.
There is of course, a feedback cycle here. If you always default to launching on iOS, don't be surprised if user adoption is further limited when you eventually get around to launching on Android since by then, there would be competing products or you'll have difficulty changing the perception of "this company thinks I'm a 2nd class citizen, why would I bother?" (Snap faced some of this for a while though I'm not sur…
None of the points you raise are real issues. Android is in-fact a second-class citizen and should be prioritized as such.
Again, there is a reason you see consumer companies adopt an iOS first strategy. Experienced founders can tell you why.
By the way, Snap is a $100B+ company - that’s not a great example to make your point. If your product works, people will come - even the ones that claim they won’t. Cross platform competition is not a real concern.
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> 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 ha…
Releasing on both platforms is now the expected choice.
I don't think Clubhouse can get away from the 2010-era excuses, especially when they had a lot of VC backing and plenty of cash in less than a year. They were more than 6 months late and the competitors already copied them entirely. No waiting for invites.
They might have launched much quicker with both iOS and Android had they chose a cross-platform toolkit like React Native or Flutter.
Even the Discord app uses RN and they copied their main features much quicker than Clubhouse could write the Android app and it has worked great for Discord.
By the time Clubhouse finished the Android app and 2 months later removed the invite system. It was beyond too late.
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There is of course, a feedback cycle here. If you always default to launching on iOS, don't be surprised if user adoption is further limited when you eventually get around to launching on Android since by then, there would be competing products or you'll have difficulty changing the perception of "this company thinks I'm a 2nd class citizen, why would I bother?" (Snap faced some of this for a while though I'm not sur…
I’m not going to give away the entire playbook here but there are several very specific reasons why launching iOS first makes sense. None of the points you raise are real issues. Android is in-fact a second-class citizen and should be prioritized as such. Again, there is a reason you see consumer companies adopt an iOS first strategy. Experienced founders can tell you why. By the way, Snap is a $100B+ company - that’…
Not really if you care about number of users:
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Given how long it took them to begin the process of creating an Android app one has to wonder whether they were after some sort of exclusivity.
Clubhouse already feels irrelevant.
My whole (mostly German) LinkedIn bubble was totally hyped for around six weeks.
Since then: Nothing. It's dead, nobody seems to use it anymore.
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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.
Xamarin is/was very similar. Want to do bluetooth? Out of luck, native library time. I haven't looked at React Native, but in Xamarin all the easy stuff (basic layouts, logins etc) were no easier than writing native Android code, and the hard stuff was a lot harder due to having to integrate the native code.
Which is why I always advocate for mobile Web (plenty of CRUD apps are doable as such), native views + C++, native + server driven UI/business logic.
Mobile SDKs are already complex on their own, adding an additional development stack on top just makes everything worse, and when things go wrong one needs to be skillful enough to dig deep down anyway.
If those JNI bindings are a pain to write, having to debug the additional layers that React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, whatever put on top isn't much fun either.
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I agree that that makes sense for most types of apps. Clubhouse isn't one of those cases. In my country, influencers who had iPhones picked it up, and then promptly dropped it because most of their followers couldn't come to the party.
Well sorry to be blunt, but were they that interested in your country as a market to begin with? It makes more sense to focus on iOS if you mainly target the US, where iPhone has a very large market share.
Only targeting the US is folly for a social media app. And even there, iOS has only 60% of the market.
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Well sorry to be blunt, but were they that interested in your country as a market to begin with? It makes more sense to focus on iOS if you mainly target the US, where iPhone has a very large market share.
My country = the entire world outside the US. Only targeting the US is folly for a social media app. And even there, iOS has only 60% of the market.
Also, other rich countries, like say some north/west European ones, have a large (~50% or more) share of iPhone users as well.
If you need to go to market quickly, it makes sense to start with the trendy people with money, then you can go for the long tail of Android users.
Edit: Clubhouse isn’t an app where it matters whether every single one of your friends and family is on it for it to be useful/entertaining to you. And if you become established in the most desirable segments of some major economies first, you have a good foundation for going after the rest of the world later. There’s no need to try to cater to every single potential user on Earth from the get-go.
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> 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…
I had a VC friend who switched to an iPhone, from Android, because of FOMO on Clubhouse. Now, after he realized that Clubhouse has naturally degenerated into a bunch of random people spouting off, with only a few rare pockets of quality content, he won't admit he switched to iPhone because of Clubhouse.