Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.
Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for cross platform in our case.
We all use Android while our users are mostly in single platform approach won't work for us. We're also a hardware company, so need BLE and WebBle support isn't good enough for us.
Thanks for your answer
> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.
Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?
As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.
Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.
What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per...
> At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this problem once before on the web! We already had an internal List component that virtualizes its children. There is no way we could just drop it into React Native right?
I'm also curious why it took them so many pain points to reach list virtualization as their solution. That would've been my first thought.
So no, while they initially implemented their core chat view natively, they are using full blown react native as of right now.
https://gist.github.com/vishnevskiy/f4ba74adf5cf1d269b860fab...
This is FastList Code. it's 100% javascript, and only imports are lodash, react, and react-native
But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.)
When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many things at once.
Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At least unicode works though :)
We are sprinting as fast as we can to get an Android app out the door. We're also planning on investing more in the reader experience on web. Some time ago, we launched a web reader (reader.substack.com) in beta and have some exciting ideas in the works to evolve that surface.
Beyond Android, when it smaller platforms like iPad / Desktop apps, it's mostly a matter of looking at the data and listening to users. With a small team, we have to be judicious with prioritization, and as we increase the surface area for readers it's important that the experience for writers remains clear (right now their readers can already read on email, web, and mobile).