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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.

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.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I think the same is true for all social media. When you initially join, one of two things happen: 1) you find a small niche group of people who are nice and you have something in common with, the platform quickly finds its place in your mind and "Most visited" section of about:newtab OR 2) you get faced with the most generic, get-rich-quick ads/posts/rants and quickly get a sour taste for the entire platform. Probably HN is the only place I've actually felt (1) while everything else falls into (2) after just a day or two.
      - Cederfjard 5y ago
        Whereas for my wife, Clubhouse is in the former category. It’s interesting to see the juxtaposition between the bashing in tech circles like HN, and the use she gets out of it.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    It is. 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.
- void_mint 5y ago
  > whether they were after some sort of exclusivity. The only thing the company ever had was (fake, forced, paid) exclusivity. Once that went away people stopped caring (except those that were/are paid to be there, of course).
markdown 5y ago
> 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 or merely being poor at arithmetic, but it made no sense whatsoever.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gleenn 5y ago
  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 Android or iPhone apps first based on target demographic, and you might guess wrong, but usually businesses have a decent guess who their target customers are, and it doesn't seem foolish to focus on a small set of customers first.
  - mjmahone17 5y ago
    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.
    - BigMajestic 5y ago

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.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I think the same is true for all social media. When you initially join, one of two things happen: 1) you find a small niche group of people who are nice and you have something in common with, the platform quickly finds its place in your mind and "Most visited" section of about:newtab OR 2) you get faced with the most generic, get-rich-quick ads/posts/rants and quickly get a sour taste for the entire platform. Probably HN is the only place I've actually felt (1) while everything else falls into (2) after just a day or two.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      Whereas for my wife, Clubhouse is in the former category. It’s interesting to see the juxtaposition between the bashing in tech circles like HN, and the use she gets out of it.
- martin_a 5y ago
  It is. 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.
void_mint 5y ago
> whether they were after some sort of exclusivity. The only thing the company ever had was (fake, forced, paid) exclusivity. Once that went away people stopped caring (except those that were/are paid to be there, of course).

markdown 5y ago

> 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 or merely being poor at arithmetic, but it made no sense whatsoever.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gleenn 5y ago
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 Android or iPhone apps first based on target demographic, and you might guess wrong, but usually businesses have a decent guess who their target customers are, and it doesn't seem foolish to focus on a small set of customers first.
- mjmahone17 5y ago
  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.
  - BigMajestic 5y ago