From two 20-year old guys who’ve tried a lot on the tech scene to starting their own browser and competing with Safari and Chrome.

It’s a cloudy day in November 2018. We are sitting in the basement of my parent’s house. We are obsessed with the big questions.

Will our project ever reach a critical number of people? Should we have validated our idea more before? Can our project become something that matters? Can it compete with other browser apps out there, even Safari? Questions that probably bother anyone who has ever started their own project.

We are almost about to give up. We just failed in our last project, where we unsuccessfully tried to approach bars with a Netflix like subscription for drinks.

Who are we?

We are two young software developers, both 20 years old. We run projects together since we know each other from a tech event.

What’s that thing we are building?

We spend most of our day on the web. We create pull requests on Github, search for bug solutions on StackOverflow or explore new inventions on Product Hunt.

All these interactions we perform with the help of a web browser. Together with the command line, it is by far our most commonly used tool as devs.

When we dive deeply into a project, it often happened to us that we found ourselves lost in a mass of tabs. Of course, we never came back to close a single tab. Having open 50 tabs span across six different windows was nothing out of the ordinary for us.

The years of dealing with this toxic workflow and the fact that it was assimilated by other devs brought us to a point where we finally wanted to do something against it.

Usually the tabs just lay there and cost you a lot of memory. And forget to find this one tab you were looking for. It’s impossible. The time has come for a change.

One day in fall last year we took a look at what was already on the web. We discovered some interesting Chrome extensions (like Get Toby) which we tried over the next days, but at the end they didn’t really convinced us.

Actually we were looking for a browser which comes with an intuitive way to organize tabs. We unexpectedly found such a solution, it was called Refresh. Made by two Berlin-based design students for their bachelor thesis. Directly after discovering this project, we checked whether someone was already working on it. But nobody was.

So one weekend we sat together and started to work on it. What platform to go for? We tried to work on Chromium, the underlying engine which empowers Chrome, but it soon went too complicated for the beginning. Their concept was originally made for iPad, so it was a quick decision to start there. We wanted to reach out to them after finishing the development of a first version.

In mid-October we wrote to Julius & Julius, the two makers behind Refresh, asking them to meet in Berlin. They were impressed by what we had already built and open to collaborate.

What went well in the first two weeks, soon found its downsides. After about a month we had a call in which we had different opinions on the future plans of Refresh. So shortly afterwards we ended our collaboration. We, the devs, aimed for turning this project into a real startup once. In contrary J&J wanted to open-source the code and continue to build the project with a community.

What’s next? Give up? It wasn’t really a difficult decision for us to continue the project on our own, since we already had a working codebase and didn’t want to throw away a single line of code. Worth it?

Rebranding and the early days of Space Browser

We rebranded and renamed from Refresh to Space Browser. We were inspired by the ideas of J&J but implemented them in our own way. The first MVP was ready in early January 2019.

Where to get some early adapters? Let’s take a look on some subreddits. We promoted us as the “first mobile browser made for power users” and received a pretty good number of upvotes. Within days the number of beta testers went to the 700. We were thrilled by the first success and rolled out a new version almost every week.

Weeks passed and we took a look on the app analytics. While the number of users has increased slightly, we were shocked by the engagement rate. Most of our users disappeared already after a few weeks and never went back.

We did some user interviews and figured out that most of our users dropped out as they were too comfortable switching to a new browser and quickly returned to Safari. No wonder, Safari is everywhere, if you want to open a link on iOS it will open in Safari. Safari was unbeatable.

So what to do with a browser which may attract with its pro features but doesn’t find its existence in the user’s daily workflow?

The great hack

One day we were exploring on Twitter and coincidentally found a hack to set your default browser on iOS (if you want to learn more on that, read our blog post).

Boom yeah, that was what we needed! We added this feature to our Space Browser and made some promotion for it.

Like a miracle this changed the game and our daily users increased by 130%.

But we haven’t had enough. We looked for more testers and doubled our number of testers by April.

What’s next? Until now we were only a small project gaining for users who like our small side project. What always came to our minds these days, can this product really survive on the market and form a critical important user base? Is it worth a company?

Applying for the YC summer batch

Seeking for real validation in this field we applied for Y-Combinator in April.

After two intensive weeks on working twofold, on one hand on the product and on the other on the YC application, we submitted the application. After two weeks their reply popped up in our inbox. We were tense. This could be our ticket to an enlightening experience. And truly we made it into the second round.

Now it was time for an interview. We had one week to prepare and our tension was crazy. We spent endless nights cross-examining YC questions.

Finally the interview day had come. We did our best. But that wasn’t enough. One week later we had certainty. We were rejected. Unfortunately without knowing why (YC does not give feedback on this). Downed by the next failure we took some days off.

Go all in or leave it

Refreshed and with new energy we returned to Space Browser in May 2019. Now it was crystal clear for us how to move on. First of all we aimed for different platforms, iPhone and macOS should follow. And for sure it’s was finally time to take Space Browser out to the streets.

You will always pass this point, where you ask yourself, is it the right time to launch? Is everything ready and validated? Will our product survive out there in the wild?

Learned from several precipitations I can only say that it’s definitely worth it trying and that there will never be the perfect time to launch. At the end its always on you, don’t fear the unknown, take your product out and validation will follow faster than expected. Of course you have to prepare well, but I think it’s clear that a launch does not work by just releasing an app on the app store. It takes a lot more.

It’s a big day for us today. We step into the unknown and see where it all goes. Follow us or you will never know what comes in the dark.

Thanks for reading! I will continuously update this blog post, when we have first results from our launch.

If you found this article helpful, click the ❤️ or 👏 button below or share the article on Facebook or Twitter so your friends can benefit from it too.

We are live on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/space-browser. We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments there!

If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for our newsletter on https://spacebrowser.io

From Two Guys Building Their own Browser was originally published in Space Browser on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Long story short: You have to overwrite the http and https url schemes in your iOS application. Then the user has to turn off Safari in his Content & Privacy Restrictions. That’s basically it. 😄

If you wanna know exactly how this is possible follow the example app tutorial:

What are URL schemes?

URL schemes are used to launch system apps and third-party apps trough URLs. For example to facetime someone you can type into your browser facetime://+123456789. Furthermore you can create your own customs url schemes, so that other applications can launch your app via these urls.

For your reference here is a list of url schemes for various apps:

Always-Updated List of iOS App URL Scheme Names

How can you use it?

Create a new Xcode iOS Project, select Single View App, enter a name (like URL Schemes Sample) and continue. Then:

1. Go to your projects settings, select your app’s target and click on the Info section at the top.
2. Search for the URL Types section and add an entry.
3. Add an identifier (easiest way is to use your bundle identifier), add the URL Schemes you want to overwrite (in our case http) and set the role to Viewer.
4. Repeat step 2 and 3 for the URL Scheme https.

5. Open your AppDelegate.swift and add this function:

Now it’s up to you, how you handle the incoming URL. :) For this example app I decided to just show an alert displaying the URL.

6. Your users have to do some configurations so that this hack is possible. They can follow these few instructions we implemented into our Space Browser:

You did it! From now on every link you click will open directly in your new app.

Other cool stuff that is possible

After discovering you can overwrite the https and http url schemes in iOS, I tried out a few other system app schemes.

For some applications it is possible to overwrite them, but for the important ones it isn’t possible, such as Facetime or Mail.

Here are others which worked for me:

Podcast:

It’s possible to overwrite the URL Schemes. If you want to do that, you have to overwrite the following URL Schemes:

• pcast, itms-pcast, itms-pcasts, podcasts, itms-podcast and itms-podcasts

Just follow the steps 2 and 3 of the tutorial. Additionally, the user has to turn off the Podcast App in the Content & Privacy Restrictions settings.

This hack could be interesting for all podcast apps out there. Every time someone clicks on a podcast link, their app opens instead of the built-in Apple Podcast app. Here is a short demonstration:

iTunes Store

It’s also possible to overwrite the iTunes Store URL Schemes. These are:

• itms and itmss

In this case, however, I don’t see a good use case where this hack can be used. It’s rather a security issue.

Conclusion

What was unusual: each app showed different behavior when you overwrote its URL scheme and disabled it in the Content & Privacy Restrictions.

I know that these hacks depend on the user. And they have to make changes to their settings. However, little social engineering tactics are needed to get many users to do that. Nevertheless, I hope Apple won’t close this “security issue”, but will review the apps to see if someone is overwriting the url schemes with a good intention (as we do with Space Browser) or using it for malicious purposes.

You can find a demo project here, where I just randomly tried to overwrite some URL schemes.

https://github.com/JohannesHa/OverwriteURLSchemes

ABOUT US

We are building Space Browser - The first mobile browser made for power users. Space let’s you can organize your tabs into spaces, which act like smart folders and we make it easy to recall your tabs with the help of our rethought history, where you can travel back in time to restore entire sessions or just that one tab you were searching for.

You can download the Space Browser beta for your iPad here:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/UZCCWbHA

We would love to hear your feedback! :)

Also don’t forget to check out our demo video:

How to set the default browser on iOS was originally published in Space Browser on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: We found a hack to set Space as your default browser on iOS. It’s already implemented in the latest update. To set Space as your default browser you have to follow these simple steps inside the app:

We will write a blog post in the next days, explaining how we made this possible. And how you can use this hack to do other cool stuff.

Stay tuned! 🚀

Space Browser Improvements was originally published in Space Browser on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In case you don’t know us, here is a brief introduction about us:

I am Johannes a 21 years old developer from Berlin. I am running Space Browser together with Dominik who is a 20 years old developer and a much better designer than I am. We both worked on a lot of projects for the last 2 years. For example we built an app called FirstDrink, which was the Netflix of Bars. We participated on a lot of Hackathons and for the last 5 month we worked on Space Browser.

If you haven’t done it yet, check out our Space Browser trailer:

Current mobile browsers do not satisfy power user needs. There is no way to manage a lot of open tabs or to recall your tabs. Space takes a browser to the next level and reorganise the way we handle tabs. It’s made for power users and takes typical desktop like features to a mobile device.

In this blog Dominik and I will write about hacks (for example how we’ve managed to set the default browser on iOS), Space Browser updates, iOS development, clean code and much more.

Space is currently in an open beta. You can download Space for your iPad here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/UZCCWbHA

Stay tuned 🚀

The New Space Browser Blog was originally published in Space Browser on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.