On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism or merely being poor at arithmetic, but it made no sense whatsoever.
And when you do break things, it’s relatively easy (especially on iPhone where most users upgrade apps quickly) to fix the client, wait for the next release, then remove the unwanted server feature.
Once you have two or more client implementations, you have to keep track of a lot more things, your QA checklist grows, and you therefore need to move more carefully for server upgrades.
In my country, influencers who had iPhones picked it up, and then promptly dropped it because most of their followers couldn't come to the party.
Only targeting the US is folly for a social media app. And even there, iOS has only 60% of the market.
Also, other rich countries, like say some north/west European ones, have a large (~50% or more) share of iPhone users as well.
If you need to go to market quickly, it makes sense to start with the trendy people with money, then you can go for the long tail of Android users.
Edit: Clubhouse isn’t an app where it matters whether every single one of your friends and family is on it for it to be useful/entertaining to you. And if you become established in the most desirable segments of some major economies first, you have a good foundation for going after the rest of the world later. There’s no need to try to cater to every single potential user on Earth from the get-go.
If you’re building an early stage consumer startup in the US, you should launch first on iOS period. Use that starting point to iterate rapidly to figure out product-market fit and then launch Android.
There is a reason you see the best consumer companies take this route and it’s not because they’re poor at arithmetic.
If you always default to launching on iOS, don't be surprised if user adoption is further limited when you eventually get around to launching on Android since by then, there would be competing products or you'll have difficulty changing the perception of "this company thinks I'm a 2nd class citizen, why would I bother?"
(Snap faced some of this for a while though I'm not sure what their distribution metrics look like now)
There is also a critical window when launching on multiple platforms. If you wait too long, the brand's "xyz OS only" will stick and opens the door for your competitor to say "We're like that other app but we actually work and sync across all your devices".
Apps are cancer. Apple is the company responsible for this mess.
None of the points you raise are real issues. Android is in-fact a second-class citizen and should be prioritized as such.
Again, there is a reason you see consumer companies adopt an iOS first strategy. Experienced founders can tell you why.
By the way, Snap is a $100B+ company - that’s not a great example to make your point. If your product works, people will come - even the ones that claim they won’t. Cross platform competition is not a real concern.
Not really if you care about number of users:
We are specifically talking about launching an early stage consumer startup pre product-market-fit in the US.
No, like any startup they needed to launch an MVP and iterate. Waiting until everything is available on every platform only makes sense if you have the time and resources, which they didn't. They were a small team with limited resources.
Clubhouse wasn’t explosively popular when it launched. The success came a few months later, at which point they had more people seeking invites than they wanted to allow on to the platform. Focusing on getting something minimal out the door and scaling it up is the right choice.
If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice. Tech enthusiasts and early adopters skew toward iOS by a small margin and iOS is a more predictable platform to develop for because you can count on most of your user base being on the current iOS version. Android is a development minefield by comparison, especially when it comes to audio and video.
I agree, but they didn't. There was no MVP for Android.
> Waiting until everything is available on every platform
Not everything, just an MVP. Wait until you have an MVP on the biggest platform first, and then launch.
> Focusing on getting something minimal out the door and scaling it up is the right choice.
Yup, an MVP on Android and iOS would have been perfect.
> If you’re going to pick one platform to launch an MVP, iOS is almost always the right choice.... Tech enthusiasts and early adopters skew toward ....
Again, this is true for most cases, but not an app like Clubhouse. In most of the world the influencers jumped on it immediately but dropped it like a hot potato when they realised none of the people they wanted to influence could show up to worship them.
Releasing on both platforms is now the expected choice.
I don't think Clubhouse can get away from the 2010-era excuses, especially when they had a lot of VC backing and plenty of cash in less than a year. They were more than 6 months late and the competitors already copied them entirely. No waiting for invites.
They might have launched much quicker with both iOS and Android had they chose a cross-platform toolkit like React Native or Flutter.
Even the Discord app uses RN and they copied their main features much quicker than Clubhouse could write the Android app and it has worked great for Discord.
By the time Clubhouse finished the Android app and 2 months later removed the invite system. It was beyond too late.