Agree completely! We have a spike this week to look at the work to roll out an Android version. That said, we also need to weigh up the roadmap overall and tradeoffs of what the iOS app users need out of the gates
I would almost be tempted to drop iOS. The holy grail for a product is to find the problem you can provide a 10x better solution to. I wonder if you’ll ever be able to be 10x better for creating a website for the vast majority of iOS users. But I would bet a lot of money that you can be 10x better for a majority of Android users. Earning revenue from that market is harder, but it’s not an insurmountable challenge.
Anyway, you know what’s best for your product. Great work on what you’ve done so far.
:-) Yes that's intentional, we've started life completely focused on mobile and Instagram (which is broadly only used on mobile).
It means that we get to try to focus on making one experience strong. That said, ultimately the user is providing data which is independent of the look, so evolving a desktop variant is totally doable.
We're (currently) keen to not necessarily run towards traditional responsive design. The reason being that you have a lot of design consequences / unintentional visual limitations - it's one of the reasons a lot of websites kind of look the same, especially from website builders and tools (they go heavy on block layouts to make it easy to deal with responsive).
All that said, it's iteration 1, and our launch is really a 'beta' launch more than anything.
> you have a lot of design consequences / unintentional visual limitations
Would you mind elaborating on what you think those limitations are?
I feel like it’s easy to say ‘nah we don’t do responsive’ instead of figuring out a way do just do it. I can’t come up with a single example that I couldn’t translate from mobile to desktop in some way.
Sorry, I didn't write that very well. I think the consequences are pragmatic ones. In order to achieve more complicated visual designs you have to do a lot more work to make them considerate of all the different situations they might appear in. So pragmatically you either make less designs, or you limit the designs to simpler to scale paradigms (like block layouts) which require less pre-consideration.
As the foundation of this app is the idea that a user can just switch layout/visuals, it needs a lot of visual looks to switch between. Doing a lot of those, and having the responsiveness, and then iterating on app/data model features (which need updates to those designs) is quite a drain on speed.
All that said, since you asked for a single _actual_ example, I have one which I think is quite problematic (though could be addressed in some way, just not easily). We've kicked around the idea of letting users place stickers over the top of their design in order to customise them (a little like Instagram Stories), it's not obvious how to migrate a user input visual through a responsive set of designs without a lot of trouble (the most obvious solution being to guess and then let the user tweak at different responsive breaks).
Hopefully that convinces you that it wasn't just a throwaway 'nah we don't do responsive' :) I'm sure we could do better than where we currently are, and it is an iteration one release!
If you constrained the width to phone dimensions, but did not constrain the vertical space as much, it would keep similar flavor but be more appealing on non-mobile.
Good thinking, and would enable us to keep ideas like 'stickers' that we've kicked around internally as fun future features (that are way less hard in a non-responsive environment)
Thanks Y_Y it is definitely quite limited at the moment, and intentionally so. We wanted to scope down to something we could pull together and launch as a team who'd never made an iOS app before and wanted to get out to market to validate before getting too excited about patting ourselves on the back.
Hopefully from here we can iterate to a bigger scope (without overblowing it :-)
Oh yay!!! I was super nervous giving that talk, but I do love side projects.
This one is a mix. I have a side project running an Instagram account so had seen first hand a lot of the needs you run into with a single link in bio, plus all the different neat linking solutions (shout out to another Australian company - Linktree!).
So when it came up in Dec that we were thinking of an angle on the website market, and our marketer suggested we think about Instagram, it all clicked.
Fwiw I can remember a time when I was like "Why on earth would anyone want Squarespace when they can host their own site!?"
These days I try to assume I probably don't understand! For the start of this product, we had a Design Sprint where we came up with the idea, and then brought in real Instagram users to test the idea on (with very lowfi prototypes) befor actually building!
The number of businesses which need hosting is larger than those who are capable of self-hosting. So Squarespace makes obvious sense.
Through that lens: is the number of businesses/people that need a website builder greater than the number of them with access to a desktop computer? For the US, I'd say no. But in Asia I can see this being the case.
First, thank you for the kind words and actually taking the time to make a site!
You're totally right that it's not necessarily a straight forward space. Constraining any complicated job (and websites are actually quite complicated) into a space where data entry is a hassle, fine tune controls are difficult, and it's hard to see the output at the same time as doing the creation task ... eek!
That said, I'm excited about the direction the app has taken as it has good potential for simply UX.
The other company in the space that's doing a neat job (and not in your list) is Universe! They've also got a really novel take on things.
(And thanks for the bug report, will get it sorted)