How long would the Mailbox app line be in real-life? | Hacker News Reader

How long would the Mailbox app line be in real-life?

waxy.org

28 pointswaxpancake31 comments

Can someone clue me in on this - people are now standing in line for software? The only logical two reasons I can think of:

1) Their backend doesn't scale well enough

2) Artifical scarcity to make people think they are missing out on something

and 3) it's displayed 4th in the itunes store when you search for mail, and is the first generic mail app displayed in the results. Look at these results:

1) Gmail 2) mail.com 3) Yahoo mail 4) mailbox 5) Windows Live Hotmail 6) Voice Changer Plus 7) Emoji and Unicode Icons 8) Dragon Dictation 9) Ink Cards Personalized 10) A+ Emotion Icons ... Continues with more completely-unrelated-to-mail results.

If I was searching for a mail client, then mailbox would be it apparently.

Shame, because Mailbox is Gmail only I believe.

> If I was searching for a mail client, then mailbox would be it apparently.

FWIW, the reviews on the AU App Store are very mixed - 82 5-star, 20 4-star, 11 3-star, 2 2-star and 58 1-star.

Many of the 1-star reviews are complaining about how this (free) app has a waiting line.

Remember the clamor for Gmail invitations back when it launched in early 2004? http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/06/63786 (The service remained invite-only until 2007, though invites quickly became less scarce.)

For a while after the Gmail launch, it seemed almost obligatory for new services to launch with long waiting lists and/or scarce invitations.

Ah this reminds me of Aaron Swartz on "The Gmail Launch" for launching applications.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/howtolaunch

It's a shame an email client needs a back end.

Key features of mailbox - email snoozing, lists etc. would be hard without backend support.

Care to explain what those features are?

Lists are just IMAP folders.

Email snoozing needs some kind of backend, but it doesn't really need access to your GMail account credentials. The backend could just re-send you the email normally.

iOS has an API to schedule a client-side notification without server-side involvement.

It does (Local Notifications) but to set those the app would need to check for new email and if it finds any create the notification. AFAIK on iOS it can't check for the email in the background, the app would need to be open (removing the need for the notification).

It's really just an iOS issue. Apps can't run in the background to check mail and give notifications. So you need to check the mail on the server and send a new mail notification independently of the app.

The weird side-effect of this hack is that you get a notification of a new email, then you open the Mailbox app and it has to go retrieve the new email from the server.

Oh! So that is why? I always wondered why that happened with Gmail. It just didn't make any sense to me...

Their stated reason is:

3) They don't know if their backend scales well.

So their rollout plan is basically to add twice as many accounts each week, then see if it handles the load, then repeat.

3) Avoid getting 1 million new users in a day, which could cause a huge load on tech support.

I've been waiting for two weeks, and I've finally broken 50,000. I don't know if I even want to use this app anymore.

Their rationale makes sense - it is better to make people wait than everyone have a crappy experience, but given how easy infrastructure is to come by these days and how quickly one can provision it, I'm worried they're taking too long and people will forget or uninstall the app. That said, when it finally lets me in, this could change my life and I may not even know it. But at this rate, I definitely won't.

It took me a bit to get used to it, but I have loved it. My inbox is constantly clean, and I am better at following up on things in it that I had as reminders.

It's sort of a strange thing. An app like this should have the easiest horizontally scalable backend ever. Each user has no overlap whatsoever with other users (unlike more complex sharded instances like ebay, facebook, and every other social app).

So it must be more of a business decision about whether it's worth the cost of firing up all those new servers for a currently free app.

Makes me think they should have just charged for it out of the gate, then they'd have the financial incentive to actually fire up all those servers. Or a "subscribe now" to get to the front of the line.

It might not be quite that simple. There could be limitations on whatever database they are using and the way they set it up as well.

It's a pretty good app, but I had the advantage of getting in within the first couple days. Admittedly, if I had to wait more than a week or two, I would've deleted it by now. It has some snazzy UI tricks and adds some smart task-based stuff to your email, but nothing life-changing. I haven't experienced any slowdown yet – I'd love to see them double, even triple the acceptance rate. I would be fine with taking a speed hit if it meant the massive queue started to speed up.

I'm around 20k. It's made me really excited to use the app. Just a couple days longer

Remember when email used to be a standard? Yeah, those were the days. All you had to do to get your email on any device was download a client, give it your credentials and bam! All your emails. Nowadays we have email clients that only work with specific hosts, email clients that require you share your credentials with their servers so they can poll that one specific host, because apparently it's not possible to write an email client on some OSes. Oh the times.

I'm curious as to whether or not this kind of thing will spring up more and more in other apps.

They'll might have worked out a way of making money with the app by the time the author gets to see his inbox. I won't hold my breath though.

If you're impatient you can skip the line with proxy shenanigans.

what?

The author of that blog post linearly extrapolated his wait time. Instead of whining, perhaps they should read what's actually happening here: http://www.mailboxapp.com/reservations/?p=1#how-were-rolling...

Oh, and that app they're waiting for? Yeah, it's free.

Free*

* business plan to be revealed later.

Author here. Except for a moment where they shut off invites entirely, it's stayed consistent at a linear 800/hour for the last two weeks. At some point, presumably, they'll increase that but they haven't yet. The prediction on caniusemailboxyet.com ended up being accurate to the day. In my post, I disclaimed this by saying that the figures were at the current rate.

And I'm not "whining," thank you. I already have access to the app. I just thought it was a fun way to visualize the line.

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