No comments on the stories read, no writing or editing? Why not?
I get that the website offers a better writing environment, but I’m sure people would like to at least comment on what they read… how many wait until they get to a computer? They have to pull up the story again just to comment; I wonder how many people will actually do that, when it’s easy to just move on.
For whatever reason, perhaps it’s technical, Medium has chosen not to make mobile blogging a priority. This makes it far less attractive to me, perhaps confusing to others, far less usable.
Perhaps they think that people won’t create longford, meaningful content on a mobile device.
I could buy that argument. Medium has to distinguish itself from Twitter or Tumblr in ways other than the visual. It’s unfortunate, however, that if this is the case, we may never see the Medium app improve. Personally I write the majority of my Says Brad content on an iPad. I don’t buy the argument that not having a feature is a feature. iA does — and that’s probably why Ulysses is my preferred desktop (soon to be iPad) writing environment.
At least if there were a way to comment on stories and some kind of Save Draft feature in Medium, particularly for responses. It’s just not convenient at all to write an entry on the iPad and either email it or open it in some Mac/iOS synched app on a desktop in order to post, particularly if the text is less than a full story. It’s a silly extra step to send/synch/fetch photos from my iPhone on a desktop to add them to an entry.
Maybe opening up Medium via the app would add a bit of extra clutter to its environment, but I think a lot of amazing stories would appear also. There are a lot of disabled people who primarily or exclusively use an iPad — I’m sure that there are a lot of special-use cases, too. People traveling or in a place where a notebook or desktop just isn’t practical.
Or they could enhance their mobile site.
Either way, problem solved, people happy.
