>They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive
Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
I remember their Android app being shitty. Especially the camera, which is literally their primary feature. It took pictures by taking screenshots instead of going through the proper process of capturing the full-resolution image.
> I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing
I was so fed up by the lack of the Clubhouse app on Android that I made one myself using reverse-engineered API docs. And, I managed to do it right when it was on top of its popularity. The amount of attention (and not very smart questions from journalists) I got was absolutely mind-blowing. Who would've known that a for-fun 2-day project could do that?..
By the time they did finally release an official Android app several months later, Clubhouse was largely forgotten.
I'll never understand this thing with an excellent iOS app but the Android app being an afterthought. No, there's not THAT much fragmentation any more. This excuse is no longer valid. You really only run into device-specific bugs when you use low-level stuff like video codecs, but even then, these are rare.
> I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
Yeah, it was essentially that kind of mistake. Like, it appears that nobody learned from Fb's mistakes (letting Orkut get a toehold in brazil before they moved there).
I sortof exaggerated, they did have an Android app but basically invested nothing in it. I remember that just before FB cloned them (in literally every place they could) they were talking about how iOS was all that mattered, as those users are richer.
They didn't seem to get that you either need to show user growth or revenue growth, and failed at both.
Yeah it was pretty well documented that Snap's behavior on Android (literally taking a screenshot of the viewfinder) was way worse than on iOS, and features like e.g. video would always come out on iOS before Android
Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.