The Story of AppChat, and Why Android is a Better Platform for Startups than iOS

A month or so ago we were feeling a little burned out on our main project. So we did what we often do when it is time for a break: allow ourselves a week to work on something new and crazy, publish it, and see how it goes. It’s a great way reset your thinking, have fun building something from scratch, and take a quick shot at a cool idea.

This time, our idea was called “AppChat”. It’s an Android app that creates a public chat room for every app on your phone. We thought it might be cool if users could instantly and effortlessly chat about whatever app they were using with other fans of that app.

There are a few reasons we chose Android for this project. First and foremost, Android allows an app (once it asks for the appropriate permissions) to see what all the other apps are on the phone — very important for this concept! We also felt we could make this product much sharper and more compelling with the following features:

• From any app, the user can swipe in from the bottom right corner of the phone to reveal a small button that jumps the user right in to the chat room for that app. Yes, Android allows you to do stuff like this!
• Whenever the user snaps a screenshot, AppChat detects it and presents a notification to the user, allowing the screenshot to be shared in the corresponding chat room with a single tap.
• Our goal was to do this whole project in a single week. Writing an MVP in one week only to wait a whole extra week or longer for app store approval seemed crazy to us. Our app was live within a few hours of uploading to the Play Store, with no onerous review process.

We started on a Friday, stuck to our schedule, and by the following Thursday the app was released. We posted it to the XDA Forums, a community with a lot of Android enthusiasts that we thought would be ideal users of our app. The reaction was… nothing. We were disappointed, but at least we had only wasted a week. They say you should “fail fast” and we had done so, with flying colors.

However, the next day we started to see a trickle of users, which quickly became a torrent. We soon discovered that our app had been posted to the /r/Android subreddit, which turned out to have the ideal audience we were looking for. It jumped to the top of the subreddit and we spent the next few days in “freak-out mode”, doing everything we could to keep the servers up and the users happy. In that first week, over 70k messages were posted by nearly 7k users, including over 6k screenshots.

During that wild week, we were also releasing the app at least once a day, and often two or three times. Many of those updates were crucial to fixing critical bugs and handling the load. Once again, we don’t think it would have been possible to get through those rough couple of days if we couldn’t rely on quick and reliable app updates.

So, the project has seen some early success. In fact, we think it has good promise and we are still working on it. But the main point here is that we didn’t know that this app would be a good idea when we built it. We just though that it was a fairly interesting and powerful idea. That’s probaby how many good ideas look at first. When targeting the web, you can have an idea, build it quickly, iterate, debug, enhance and see if users respond to it. Mobile makes that far more difficult, especially iOS. Waiting a week for a review is a huge impediment. Ideas that disrupt the “accepted” workflow of the phone are typically rejected by Apple. We don’t doubt that even if it had been possible to implement AppChat’s features on iOS, it would have been rejected by Apple’s reviewers anyways. Even if we had managed to get it released, we would have been unable to update the app quickly enough to respond to our deluge of users. All of these factors result in a shift in strategy away from MVP and back to something akin to the late 90s dot-com approach: envision the “perfect” product, carefully and time-intensively build it, deploy a “launch strategy”, and then hope for the best.

Android’s more open, speedier model — while not perfect — gets us far closer to that pure, fast, iterative MVP experience that we think is needed to allow developers to try the weird, silly, funny or even stupid ideas that, occasionally, turn into the best and coolest new consumer apps.