15 ms·

Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

140 points by domino 5y ago

baxtr 5y ago
Are 10 weeks a lot or a new world record of some kind? I have no references so I can’t say. But back in the day, me and 2 friends coding 10 weeks in a row would get as very, very far.
- saurik 5y ago
  Given how classically horrible the low-latency Android audio API is--to the point where Google was running panels at I/O that would start with "before we begin, I just want to be clear: we have not fixed it", and everyone I know who did audio tended to be stuck with iOS-only--I can see it having been a short time, but that was many years ago and I don't even think they wrote the audio parts (I think they might have used not just Agora as a service, but the Agora SDK?) so I could see it being a long time... ;P.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a Clubhouse contract developer. Opinions here and elsewhere my own. 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.
mciancia 5y ago
Clubhouse is still a thing?
ex3ndr 5y ago
Great experience? They even haven't shipped full onboarding and contract import flow at all in the first release.
cddotdotslash 5y ago
I think they missed the hype train for this one. Anecdotal, but every person I know who used Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic has completely or nearly completely stopped using it in favor of outside or in-person socialization now.
- vmception 5y ago
  Or twitter spaces 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.
- raina_rain 5y ago
  Maybe it will catch a new wave with Android release.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Releasing an Android app earlier wouldn't have changed anything substantial for them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
Wew. Apparently this app still exists?
blkhp19 5y ago
Good on them for building things the right way for each platform. I'd love to hear more about how they architect things on the iOS side!
stingraycharles 5y ago
Almost all the comments on this post seem incredibly negative and snarky comments like “wow they still exist”. Please consider that they are a small team, have gone under what can only be considered a monumental explosive growth, and given circumstances, shipping an app from scratch in less than 2.5months can be considered pretty good.
- ardit33 5y ago
  they had lots of funding though.... A 10mil round in June-July 2020, that's more than 14 months ago. Plenty of time to get a decent base feature android app. Also, they haven't added any features to the iOS app, and their voice quality in the height of it was really lacking (low qual. and lots of hickups), and there were room limitations, etc.... Anyway, it is remarkable what they achieved, as most of us (or our projects) will never get to that growth curve hype they did get, and hats up to them, and yet it is disappointing at the same time as it fizzled out. Feels like Friendster from 2003. Explosive growth for a while, but struggled to scale with features and usage load until it fell away.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    10mil, yes, but a lot of it probably went into the infra, bandwidth, and marketing (getting famous people and influencers into the rooms)
    - CydeWeys 5y ago
      Also, $10M is really very little money to build an entire big business that everyone knows about out if. Large companies will spend more than that on a single advertising campaign without blinking.
      - respondo2134 5y ago
        Interesting comment, but can you share some first-hand experience where a company spent $10M on a single ad compaign? It is a shit-load of money; anyone saying otherwise has never been remotelly close to anything near 10 million.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Most fascinating thing about Clubhouse was just how much time Twitter and other majoy SV players spent replicating something that was popular for maybe 12 days mid-pandemic, at best.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  their engineers were happy to finally have something to work on
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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 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.
- tomComb 5y ago
  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.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Clubhouse already feels irrelevant.
    - dt3ft 5y ago
      I tried it a while ago, the content was mostly people selling either themselves or their merchandise (books, courses, schemes). My sample was not just one try, I gave it a whole week. Same faces, same sale schemes. Uninstalled, figured it wasn't for me.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Clubhouse? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
ramoz 5y ago
As someone in tech I always thought the core experience was a quality product. As an extinct user, the experience increasingly diminished the more "creators" were enabled / whatever started becoming of the "creator-first" mantra. It last felt like i was on a TV guide scanning through a bunch of paid programming, c-class doctor phils, and had lost the connections I made / ability to do the whole collective learning that felt really powerful at one point. Clubhouse felt like "something else" for a bit, and then suddenly it didn't. I stopped using the app right around when android was released. I think Android users missed out.
jimmySixDOF 5y ago
Title could have been "Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks 6 months late"
- raina_rain 5y ago
  Don't know why this is downvoted. It was late. Had they released it sooner maybe the app could've caught a second viral wave
  - rvz 5y ago
    Exactly. It was more than 6 months late not '10 Weeks'. The users do not care if it is native or not. As long as it exists on their platform of choice, they will use it. The fact that it was not on Android in the first place, then being copied by the existing competitors and lockdowns lifting is the reason why the hype fizzled quickly and by the time they finished the Android app, it was already too late.
gmaster1440 5y ago
Great write up, and kudos to the team for delivering under pressure. Would be nice to read why the team decided not to build a React Native app from the beginning.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  Ironic to see so many HN people complaining that their Android app missed the hype train but HN is usually where I go to get my daily dose of React hate. If they had used react native they might have released them at the same time.
simonswords82 5y ago
When Clubhouse was first launched people in my LinkedIn network were holding Clubhouse meetings that I could not join because I am on Android. I had FOMO for all of a week, and now I don't care. There is not room in the current ecosystem for another meeting app. I don't see a long term future for this app.
colesantiago 5y ago
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.
- kevmo314 5y ago
  Having dealt with Agora's RN SDK, honestly looking back I think it would've been easier to just write two completely separate native apps.
- taylorhughes 5y ago
  [I'm on the clubhouse team, but was not involved in this decision] 1) the CH iOS app itself has a long history of powering other prototypes / small communities before CH existed — so I think the early engineers were leveraging what they had already, vs starting out from zero. (I think this is why they were able to find fit with CH - ability to move fast and try different things.) 2) I built an app with RN at a previous company and it was a reasonable experience, but custom UI / transitions / etc was pretty much out the window. I don't think it's an obvious choice by any means to go with RN, especially for a media-heavy app. Also, expanding that particular RN app I had built to Android was no easy task — the UI mostly "just worked" when we built the Android container, but many of our third party libraries didn't work at all on Android, and managing app navigation was a huge hassle between the two platforms. We ended up shelving the android effort altogether and shut the whole project down a bit later. :)
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
bencoder 5y ago
I really wanted this back then when it felt like I was missing out. Then twitter released their version and I got a taste and decided I wasn't into it after all.
donnythecroc 5y ago
This is one of those interesting instances in which big tech copying a new startup has actually worked. The problem they had was most rooms were advertised on twitter. Now the Twitter Spaces integration means it's a one click for the organiser to set up and advertise a room to their twitter user base. It's very smooth for the user as well - one click, no separate app.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Clubhouse's feature was ted talks, which quickly turned into ponzi scheme talks. I don't think they had a chance, and it feels like the Clubhouse hype died down about a month before Twitter made a wide release for Spaces.
sergiotapia 5y ago
Thought this was about the SDLC app not the chat app.
prezjordan 5y ago
Mopewa is a force to be reckoned with. Wish her name were closer to the top!
Ecko123 5y ago
Kudos for the effort but it would be dumb not to use Flutter at this state and go just native. PS: This is coming for somebody with 10 yrs of dev experience to all the CTOs right now doing mobile app.
grishka 5y ago
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 https://github.com/grishka/Houseclub
- taylorhughes 5y ago
  > 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. ...
  - grishka 5y ago
    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 https://vk.com/wall-55882680_74 (in Russian)
    - raina_rain 5y ago
      Developer speak: 2-3 weeks = 12-13 weeks
    - aliswe 5y ago
      It's not only about implementing. QA, Monitoring, Regression tests ...
  - 0des 5y ago
    This happens to me a lot. I get excited to show somebody something that, to me, is significant, but when I get to show them, suddenly I can see how much isn't done or isn't right.
respondo2134 5y ago
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!
edderly 5y ago
Congratulations. Although it is easy to have reservations about the concept and rollout of Clubhouse. From a developer perspective it is pretty cool.
northerdome 5y ago
A native app from the ground up in 10 weeks is impressive. Now I want to know how Superhuman has gotten away with not having an Android app for so long, and what on earth they could be doing given they say they have been "working on it" for years and over $100 million in VC funding.
spbaar 5y ago
Eye opening. I would have bet a million bucks they had the Android app in their back pocket but were holding off on launch until they perfected quality control or recommendation engine. There must have been some reason they're not telling
npv789 5y ago
meh, missed momentum
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
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.
- ackbar03 5y ago
  This has to rank near the top of the most vain thing I've ever heard before. Thanks for sharing.
  - askafriend 5y ago
    It’s not vain, it’s literally part of the job to evaluate new products and services. Don’t be so needlessly judgemental.
- osullivj 5y ago
  That's a useful signal. I wouldn't invest in or work for any startup backed by a guy who can't admit to a friend that he got things wrong.
- 0des 5y ago
  You should be a better friend and maybe work through some of these impulses instead of seeking validation about being "right"
rainboiboi 5y ago
Let's face it - Clubhouse used to be interesting because the "high-value" people they managed to attract at the very beginning. As the hype falters, what's left is a bunch of "normal/man-on-the-street" people who contribute relatively low-value signals. They need to crack the longtail problem before they can take off again.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I'm always a fan of separate, native implementations, as opposed to "hybrid," ones, but we can't always make a valid business case for native apps. I have told folks, on occasion, that have approached me to do apps (I write native Apple apps, in Swift), that they are probably better off, looking at doing hybrid apps. One advantage of starting off with a single-platform native app, is that it can act as a "design spec and MVP" for the second platform. I suspect the Android app will be a lot better that the iOS app (which I wasn't really thrilled by). They probably only had a native iOS app developer, on hand to do the work, when things got started, and it isn't actually a bad business decision, to start with Apple. The app I'm developing now, is iOS-native, and we decided to go with Apple, because that was the talent pool on hand (Yours, Troolie), and a significant number of folks out there, have the ability to run Apple iOS apps. Also, in my opinion, you are best off starting with Apple, because the platform is more restricted than Android, so you aren't as likely to develop capabilities on one platform, that can't be implemented on the other.

140 points by domino 5y ago

Are 10 weeks a lot or a new world record of some kind? I have no references so I can’t say. But back in the day, me and 2 friends coding 10 weeks in a row would get as very, very far.

saurik 5y ago
Given how classically horrible the low-latency Android audio API is--to the point where Google was running panels at I/O that would start with "before we begin, I just want to be clear: we have not fixed it", and everyone I know who did audio tended to be stuck with iOS-only--I can see it having been a short time, but that was many years ago and I don't even think they wrote the audio parts (I think they might have used not just Agora as a service, but the Agora SDK?) so I could see it being a long time... ;P.
3pt14159 5y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a Clubhouse contract developer. Opinions here and elsewhere my own. 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.

mciancia 5y ago

Clubhouse is still a thing?

ex3ndr 5y ago

Great experience? They even haven't shipped full onboarding and contract import flow at all in the first release.

cddotdotslash 5y ago

I think they missed the hype train for this one. Anecdotal, but every person I know who used Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic has completely or nearly completely stopped using it in favor of outside or in-person socialization now.

vmception 5y ago
Or twitter spaces 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.
raina_rain 5y ago
Maybe it will catch a new wave with Android release.
shafyy 5y ago
Releasing an Android app earlier wouldn't have changed anything substantial for them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

Wew. Apparently this app still exists?

blkhp19 5y ago

Good on them for building things the right way for each platform. I'd love to hear more about how they architect things on the iOS side!

stingraycharles 5y ago

Almost all the comments on this post seem incredibly negative and snarky comments like “wow they still exist”. Please consider that they are a small team, have gone under what can only be considered a monumental explosive growth, and given circumstances, shipping an app from scratch in less than 2.5months can be considered pretty good.

ardit33 5y ago
they had lots of funding though.... A 10mil round in June-July 2020, that's more than 14 months ago. Plenty of time to get a decent base feature android app. Also, they haven't added any features to the iOS app, and their voice quality in the height of it was really lacking (low qual. and lots of hickups), and there were room limitations, etc.... Anyway, it is remarkable what they achieved, as most of us (or our projects) will never get to that growth curve hype they did get, and hats up to them, and yet it is disappointing at the same time as it fizzled out. Feels like Friendster from 2003. Explosive growth for a while, but struggled to scale with features and usage load until it fell away.
- mynegation 5y ago
  10mil, yes, but a lot of it probably went into the infra, bandwidth, and marketing (getting famous people and influencers into the rooms)
  - CydeWeys 5y ago
    Also, $10M is really very little money to build an entire big business that everyone knows about out if. Large companies will spend more than that on a single advertising campaign without blinking.
    - respondo2134 5y ago
      Interesting comment, but can you share some first-hand experience where a company spent $10M on a single ad compaign? It is a shit-load of money; anyone saying otherwise has never been remotelly close to anything near 10 million.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Most fascinating thing about Clubhouse was just how much time Twitter and other majoy SV players spent replicating something that was popular for maybe 12 days mid-pandemic, at best.

cblconfederate 5y ago
their engineers were happy to finally have something to work on

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

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 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.

tomComb 5y ago
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.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Clubhouse already feels irrelevant.
  - dt3ft 5y ago
    I tried it a while ago, the content was mostly people selling either themselves or their merchandise (books, courses, schemes). My sample was not just one try, I gave it a whole week. Same faces, same sale schemes. Uninstalled, figured it wasn't for me.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Clubhouse? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

ramoz 5y ago

As someone in tech I always thought the core experience was a quality product. As an extinct user, the experience increasingly diminished the more "creators" were enabled / whatever started becoming of the "creator-first" mantra. It last felt like i was on a TV guide scanning through a bunch of paid programming, c-class doctor phils, and had lost the connections I made / ability to do the whole collective learning that felt really powerful at one point. Clubhouse felt like "something else" for a bit, and then suddenly it didn't. I stopped using the app right around when android was released. I think Android users missed out.

jimmySixDOF 5y ago

Title could have been "Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks 6 months late"

raina_rain 5y ago
Don't know why this is downvoted. It was late. Had they released it sooner maybe the app could've caught a second viral wave
- rvz 5y ago
  Exactly. It was more than 6 months late not '10 Weeks'. The users do not care if it is native or not. As long as it exists on their platform of choice, they will use it. The fact that it was not on Android in the first place, then being copied by the existing competitors and lockdowns lifting is the reason why the hype fizzled quickly and by the time they finished the Android app, it was already too late.

gmaster1440 5y ago

Great write up, and kudos to the team for delivering under pressure. Would be nice to read why the team decided not to build a React Native app from the beginning.

rPlayer6554 5y ago
Ironic to see so many HN people complaining that their Android app missed the hype train but HN is usually where I go to get my daily dose of React hate. If they had used react native they might have released them at the same time.

simonswords82 5y ago

When Clubhouse was first launched people in my LinkedIn network were holding Clubhouse meetings that I could not join because I am on Android. I had FOMO for all of a week, and now I don't care. There is not room in the current ecosystem for another meeting app. I don't see a long term future for this app.

colesantiago 5y ago

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.

kevmo314 5y ago
Having dealt with Agora's RN SDK, honestly looking back I think it would've been easier to just write two completely separate native apps.
taylorhughes 5y ago
[I'm on the clubhouse team, but was not involved in this decision] 1) the CH iOS app itself has a long history of powering other prototypes / small communities before CH existed — so I think the early engineers were leveraging what they had already, vs starting out from zero. (I think this is why they were able to find fit with CH - ability to move fast and try different things.) 2) I built an app with RN at a previous company and it was a reasonable experience, but custom UI / transitions / etc was pretty much out the window. I don't think it's an obvious choice by any means to go with RN, especially for a media-heavy app. Also, expanding that particular RN app I had built to Android was no easy task — the UI mostly "just worked" when we built the Android container, but many of our third party libraries didn't work at all on Android, and managing app navigation was a huge hassle between the two platforms. We ended up shelving the android effort altogether and shut the whole project down a bit later. :)
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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.
- smackeyacky 5y ago

bencoder 5y ago

I really wanted this back then when it felt like I was missing out. Then twitter released their version and I got a taste and decided I wasn't into it after all.

donnythecroc 5y ago

This is one of those interesting instances in which big tech copying a new startup has actually worked. The problem they had was most rooms were advertised on twitter. Now the Twitter Spaces integration means it's a one click for the organiser to set up and advertise a room to their twitter user base. It's very smooth for the user as well - one click, no separate app.

judge2020 5y ago
Clubhouse's feature was ted talks, which quickly turned into ponzi scheme talks. I don't think they had a chance, and it feels like the Clubhouse hype died down about a month before Twitter made a wide release for Spaces.

sergiotapia 5y ago

Thought this was about the SDLC app not the chat app.

prezjordan 5y ago

Mopewa is a force to be reckoned with. Wish her name were closer to the top!

Ecko123 5y ago

Kudos for the effort but it would be dumb not to use Flutter at this state and go just native. PS: This is coming for somebody with 10 yrs of dev experience to all the CTOs right now doing mobile app.

grishka 5y ago

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 https://github.com/grishka/Houseclub

taylorhughes 5y ago
> 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. ...
- grishka 5y ago
  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 https://vk.com/wall-55882680_74 (in Russian)
  - raina_rain 5y ago
    Developer speak: 2-3 weeks = 12-13 weeks
  - aliswe 5y ago
    It's not only about implementing. QA, Monitoring, Regression tests ...
- 0des 5y ago
  This happens to me a lot. I get excited to show somebody something that, to me, is significant, but when I get to show them, suddenly I can see how much isn't done or isn't right.

respondo2134 5y ago

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!

edderly 5y ago

Congratulations. Although it is easy to have reservations about the concept and rollout of Clubhouse. From a developer perspective it is pretty cool.

northerdome 5y ago

A native app from the ground up in 10 weeks is impressive. Now I want to know how Superhuman has gotten away with not having an Android app for so long, and what on earth they could be doing given they say they have been "working on it" for years and over $100 million in VC funding.

spbaar 5y ago

Eye opening. I would have bet a million bucks they had the Android app in their back pocket but were holding off on launch until they perfected quality control or recommendation engine. There must have been some reason they're not telling

npv789 5y ago

meh, missed momentum

bloodyplonker22 5y ago

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.

ackbar03 5y ago
This has to rank near the top of the most vain thing I've ever heard before. Thanks for sharing.
- askafriend 5y ago
  It’s not vain, it’s literally part of the job to evaluate new products and services. Don’t be so needlessly judgemental.
osullivj 5y ago
That's a useful signal. I wouldn't invest in or work for any startup backed by a guy who can't admit to a friend that he got things wrong.
0des 5y ago
You should be a better friend and maybe work through some of these impulses instead of seeking validation about being "right"

rainboiboi 5y ago

Let's face it - Clubhouse used to be interesting because the "high-value" people they managed to attract at the very beginning. As the hype falters, what's left is a bunch of "normal/man-on-the-street" people who contribute relatively low-value signals. They need to crack the longtail problem before they can take off again.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I'm always a fan of separate, native implementations, as opposed to "hybrid," ones, but we can't always make a valid business case for native apps. I have told folks, on occasion, that have approached me to do apps (I write native Apple apps, in Swift), that they are probably better off, looking at doing hybrid apps. One advantage of starting off with a single-platform native app, is that it can act as a "design spec and MVP" for the second platform. I suspect the Android app will be a lot better that the iOS app (which I wasn't really thrilled by). They probably only had a native iOS app developer, on hand to do the work, when things got started, and it isn't actually a bad business decision, to start with Apple. The app I'm developing now, is iOS-native, and we decided to go with Apple, because that was the talent pool on hand (Yours, Troolie), and a significant number of folks out there, have the ability to run Apple iOS apps. Also, in my opinion, you are best off starting with Apple, because the platform is more restricted than Android, so you aren't as likely to develop capabilities on one platform, that can't be implemented on the other.