What was your initial idea?

This is kind of a general thing I've been thinking more about lately, but its something to think about because it can greatly change what you actually code and work on. Most coders I know or I should say pretty much all focus on web application development for the most part and mobile is an afterthought. They figure well as long as it's responsive so it will work on a mobile browser then that is fine. The problem with this is even when people start with a UI template that is responsive we often don't do full testing for a mobile environment so the end result is something that ends up not looking great or having a bad experience. One example I see a lot are tables with data in them, which look horrible on mobile and are horrible to even look at data on. This would never look this way in a true native mobile app.

So recently I had a few projects and I wanted to start building them all on the web platform and then just allow them to be useable through a browser on a phone. I realized only after I got some user feedback that 90% of the users would be on mobile so asked why I was focusing on a web app even. And I was like well you can just run it from a mobile browser on your phone. So I put this app together and let some people start testing it and the feedback was bad. Even though to me it was simple to have the app running in a browser window, no real users were willing to use my app daily they said if they had to do that. They just wanted an actual app they could download and load it that way.

So I decided well no biggie you should be able to do a native wrapper around a web app pretty easily, so I got to work on that and let them start using that. Unfortunately that also proved to be a clunky user experience resulting in users complaining that it didn't feel like a real native app like the ones they are used to using. And in addition to that there is certain spacing and styling you run into like the fact that these containers can't consume all of the space inside the newer iphones or the fact that you can't just use regular javascript click handlers on things and certain events have to be transformed using other libraries like hammerjs or they won't actually work properly inside a native web wrapper.

Which brings me to my actual point or rant I should say. You should think about your user base first. If more than 50% of them are going to want to be on a mobile device, then instead of trying to build a web app, you should build a true native mobile app instead! If you don't have the skills to do that, then you need to do what I did and just bite the bullet and spend the time to learn it. When you take shortcuts like I did you end up spending a lot of time debugging weird issues or styling problems anyways for your shortcut and still won't have a product that is as nice as it could be anyways, might as well think about your target audience more from the very start and make sure you build things on the correct platform to begin with.

How many coders out there are spending any time to build real native experiences? That could be anything from Swift or Android to using something like React Native. I'm curious if anyone else see's this as a priority as a startup founder or if I'm in the only one in this mindset.

On my last startup, we started as an app for marketers working at small-middle sized businesses then we learned that there are a lot of detractors in the sales cycle and turned it into a CRM.

Hi Emir!

The idea came long before the startup, and it was the need to connect what I was creating with what I was reading (and learning), to creative narratives structures of that learning process.

But I created the Under Cloud for selfish reasons, and because I hadn't given much thought to its commercial potential, when I did, the first thing I had to do was pivot from me to journalists and people in academia — that's where I am at the moment.

In terms of what I've learned about the target audience, there are few distinct differences in terms of needs, which is good, but much work remains to be done to make sure the validation is solid.

My app, Zlappo, started out as just a way to auto-retweet your evergreen tweets automatically.

It still does that, but it's now mainly a scheduling app tailored 100% specifically for Twitter.

So stuff like scheduling Twitter threads, scheduling quoted tweets, scheduling retweets, scheduling threads with replies that go out at different times, etc. etc.

You're welcome to read the whole blog but if you skip down to "Uclusion’s first attempt" it answers your question.

Started as a hotel guest app, but soon pivoted into a hotel internal-operations management tool (based on input) and saw a the demand wave flip in our favor.

https://checkinn.co/