Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

Don&#x27;t get hung up on the &quot;Clubhouse&quot; part of the headline. This is a good, albeit somewhat sparse, article about building an Android app on a rushed timeframe.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s in that the hardest work often isn&#x27;t the technical part:<p>&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s relatively easy for developers to sit down and write greenfield apps in isolation. It&#x27;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.<p>As for timing: I&#x27;m sure the Clubhouse founders would have preferred to have an Android app ready to go during their initial popularity spike, but I don&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t admit he switched to iPhone because of Clubhouse.

Almost all the comments on this post seem incredibly negative and snarky comments like “wow they still exist”.<p>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.

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.

As someone who&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grishka&#x2F;Houseclub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grishka&#x2F;Houseclub</a>

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.

Let&#x27;s face it - Clubhouse used to be interesting because the &quot;high-value&quot; people they managed to attract at the very beginning. As the hype falters, what&#x27;s left is a bunch of &quot;normal&#x2F;man-on-the-street&quot; people who contribute relatively low-value signals. They need to crack the longtail problem before they can take off again.

When Clubhouse was first launched people in my LinkedIn network were holding Clubhouse meetings that I could not join because I am on Android.<p>I had FOMO for all of a week, and now I don&#x27;t care. There is not room in the current ecosystem for another meeting app. I don&#x27;t see a long term future for this app.

I&#x27;m very curious if there were any reasons or design decisions on why Clubhouse didn&#x27;t go for React Native from the start?<p>Would it be fair to say they could have gotten to market quicker had they went with RN?<p>Would love someone from the team to elaborate on this as Agora also has RN SDK&#x27;s as well as Firebase.

As someone in tech I always thought the core experience was a quality product.<p>As an extinct user, the experience increasingly diminished the more &quot;creators&quot; were enabled &#x2F; whatever started becoming of the &quot;creator-first&quot; 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 &#x2F; ability to do the whole collective learning that felt really powerful at one point.<p>Clubhouse felt like &quot;something else&quot; for a bit, and then suddenly it didn&#x27;t. I stopped using the app right around when android was released. I think Android users missed out.

A native app from the ground up in 10 weeks is impressive.<p>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 &quot;working on it&quot; for years and over $100 million in VC funding.

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&#x27;s a one click for the organiser to set up and advertise a room to their twitter user base. It&#x27;s very smooth for the user as well - one click, no separate app.

Engineering aspects aside, I couldn&#x27;t get past the &quot;welcome screen&quot; =&gt; &quot;collect phone number&quot; =&gt; &quot;validate phone number&quot; flow. Surely I&#x27;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!

Title could have been &quot;Shipping Clubhouse on Android in 10 Weeks 6 months late&quot;

Good on them for building things the right way for each platform. I&#x27;d love to hear more about how they architect things on the iOS side!

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&#x27;t into it after all.

I&#x27;m always a fan of separate, native implementations, as opposed to &quot;hybrid,&quot; ones, but we can&#x27;t always make a valid business case for native apps.<p>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.<p>One advantage of starting off with a single-platform native app, is that it can act as a &quot;design spec and MVP&quot; for the second platform. I suspect the Android app will be a lot better that the iOS app (which I wasn&#x27;t really thrilled by).<p>They probably only had a native iOS app developer, on hand to do the work, when things got started, and it isn&#x27;t actually a bad business decision, to start with Apple.<p>The app I&#x27;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.<p>Also, in my opinion, you are best off starting with Apple, because the platform is more restricted than Android, so you aren&#x27;t as likely to develop capabilities on one platform, that can&#x27;t be implemented on the other.

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

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.

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

Great experience?<p>They even haven&#x27;t shipped full onboarding and contract import flow at all in the first release.

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&#x27;re not telling

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.

Clubhouse is still a thing?

Clubhouse? Now that&#x27;s a name I&#x27;ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

meh, missed momentum

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