[HN Gopher] Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks
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Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks
Author : domino
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-09-09 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.clubhouse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.clubhouse.com)
| blkhp19 wrote:
| 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!
| ramoz wrote:
| 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.
| bencoder wrote:
| 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 10mil, yes, but a lot of it probably went into the infra,
| bandwidth, and marketing (getting famous people and
| influencers into the rooms)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Title could have been "Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks
| 6 months late"
| raina_rain wrote:
| 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
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| their engineers were happy to finally have something to work on
| baxtr wrote:
| 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.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| 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.
| gmaster1440 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mciancia wrote:
| Clubhouse is still a thing?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Clubhouse? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A
| long time.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Great experience?
|
| They even haven't shipped full onboarding and contract import
| flow at all in the first release.
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe it will catch a new wave with Android release.
| [deleted]
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Wew. Apparently this app still exists?
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(page generated 2021-09-09 23:00 UTC)