What We Learned

Never give a release date. Ever .

Geoff Teehan, Partner

Thankfully we didn’t fall into this trap, but so many do. Often times it’s a classic case of underestimating the effort it takes to put something of quality in market. But when you’re putting something in the App Store, you’re not in control, Apple is.

At the time, Readability had been experimenting with a controversial payment model. Readers could assign a monthly dollar amount they could afford to pay for content. As they added stories to their reading list, the system would divide their monthly payments amongst the publishers. For example, if you assigned $5 a month to Readability, and you saved 5 articles to your reading list, each of those five publishers would receive 1/5th of your monthly payment minus 30% which went to Readability to fund the business.

Aside from the model being controversial, it created issues in the App Store since Apple was trying to understand how it related to their own subscription and payment models.

It took over 100 days for it to be approved. Imagine if we had have submitted the app and stated a launch date based on the app being a week or two ‘in review’. People would have been waiting literally months for its actual release.

Fact: During the iOS versions ‘in review’ time, we were able to completely build the Android version.

The Internet can be an echo chamber

Jon Lax, Partner

Readability took a lot of criticism from very popular and loud voices on the Internet for its payment model. We are passionate about the work we did on Readability and disagreed with a lot of the criticism. We felt like we had to respond. We felt like we had to defend our work. This led to us getting dragged into several online debates that we never should have gotten into. Not because healthy debate isn’t positive, but because it was a no win argument. We weren’t going to convince our critics of our point of view, and it devolved into name calling pretty quickly.

At one point in the debate, Geoff came into my office very stressed. His Twitter feed was blowing up with criticism and debate. He wanted to wade into the fight. In Geoff’s Twitter feed, it was all people were talking about. In mine, it was quiet. We follow different people and I was not experiencieng what he was experienceing. He was in an echo chamber of the vocal minority.

We learned that our social network can amplify something very effectively. You then mistakenly think that because you are experiencing this maelstrom, everyone is... this is probably not true. When you respond, you can add to the noise just compounding the issue.

Pixel perfection in a fragmented world takes more than you think

Brendan Lynch, Developer

Because we were working on multiple platforms, we needed to ensure the application looked amazing on all screen sizes and densities—not just the very newest or best. Scaling the UI elements of your design and understanding how an asset at one density would scale to another can be confusing. Things don’t just scale natively, nor can you rely on software to export them crisply. It’s a laborious job that spirals out of control REALLY fast.

Readability is comprised of only a few views yet still uses over 6000 individual assets between Android and iOS. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to make them all look great.

After the first release was done, we created a tool to help us calculate assets across different densities. We call it the Density Converter - check it out.